Re: Any advice on remote pairing?

Adam, 

Thanks for that advice. It gave me a deeper feel for the idea. 

My problem will be working with programmers who know Agile but have never or very rarely heard about pair programming. I get the feeling they are going to hate me at first for making this a confusing experience for them since they are use to working alone on projects.
I have never done pair programming myself, but after witnesses it and really getting my head into how it works, I can't imagine any other way of working. I realized while working on this project is that our education since we were kids never really taught us to work in teams. Sure, we had group projects, but training people to work on group projects rather than competing for marks had us avoid teamwork, shared accountability.
Thanks for the latency tip. I know what you mean. There's also a sort of weird feeling with scratchy voices that makes the thing feel awkward. It's a start. I know my team will have growing pains. I know that I will need to invest in their technology over the next few months. But I hope they sincerely put their efforts into this start of remote pairing with the wish to make it happen. It's hard enough for the product manager (me) to insist from above and do the leg work to make sure things are working.
All the best, 

Milton Wani
 

    On Thursday, October 13, 2016 5:53 PM, "Adam Sroka [email protected] [extremeprogramming]" <[email protected]> wrote:
 

     

On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 7:43 PM, Jeff Langr [email protected] [extremeprogramming] <[email protected]> wrote:

I found remote pairing to be considerably more difficult than live pairing; there are too many ways to get distracted, and no safeguard of someone to smack you when you do. Any latency issues make it frustrating for the non-hosting party. Still, I'd rather pair when distributed than not pair.



This is exactly how I feel. I think the advantages of pairing outweigh anything you could do alone. However, the frustration of dealing with latency and temporary network issues can limit the amount of useful pairing time. Timezones and other remote scheduling factors can also add to the problem. 
Additionally, I have found that the best remote pair programmers are those with real face-to-face pairing experience. It is almost impossible to get the right feeling out of remote pair programming if you have never experienced what it feels like in person. So, unless you can seed your team with people who have that experience… or at least get subsets of the team physically together to practice on a fairly frequent basis, you are probably going to get mediocre results. However, this is probably still better than letting team members spend most of their work day in isolation.   #yiv6165636715 #yiv6165636715 -- #yiv6165636715ygrp-mkp {border:1px solid #d8d8d8;font-family:Arial;margin:10px 0;padding:0 10px;}#yiv6165636715 #yiv6165636715ygrp-mkp hr {border:1px solid #d8d8d8;}#yiv6165636715 #yiv6165636715ygrp-mkp #yiv6165636715hd {color:#628c2a;font-size:85%;font-weight:700;line-height:122%;margin:10px 0;}#yiv6165636715 #yiv6165636715ygrp-mkp #yiv6165636715ads {margin-bottom:10px;}#yiv6165636715 #yiv6165636715ygrp-mkp .yiv6165636715ad {padding:0 0;}#yiv6165636715 #yiv6165636715ygrp-mkp .yiv6165636715ad p {margin:0;}#yiv6165636715 #yiv6165636715ygrp-mkp .yiv6165636715ad a {color:#0000ff;text-decoration:none;}#yiv6165636715 #yiv6165636715ygrp-sponsor #yiv6165636715ygrp-lc {font-family:Arial;}#yiv6165636715 #yiv6165636715ygrp-sponsor #yiv6165636715ygrp-lc #yiv6165636715hd {margin:10px 0px;font-weight:700;font-size:78%;line-height:122%;}#yiv6165636715 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