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Adam,
I love your post and the points you make. I've found that pairing is a
practice - perhaps the only one - that managers often fail to recognize as
a skill that needs to be developed. People are (usually) not simply told to
do TDD or to write stories - typically, somebody comes in to give training
and in the best cases continued coaching. But pairing sounds so easy that
companies often just tell the team to do it, without any help at all.
Usually, the effort is abandoned as a result and the well is poisoned for
the next person who wants to drink from it.
BTW, I __am__ one of those who says you should avoid mandating practices.
Some practices can be mandatory, but it should ideally be a team decision
not what I call a DOG - Decision of One Guy. Curb your DOGs please! Of
course, like you, my preferences are conditioned on my experiences. I've
been called on a number of times to fix things up after mandatory practices
didn't work and the team rejected them. It's probably 10 times harder than
doing it right the first time.
A second reason not to mandate practices is that it's often a cop-out on
the part of a manager. Managers are supposed to mandate __results__ but
that's a lot harder to do. I've done a few gigs where I coached a manager
through the process of doing that but I'm afraid I got bored with it - I'd
rather coach programmers. Somebody else should come along and show managers
how to specify results that make adoption of good practices a no-brainer
for the team.
Charlie
On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 12:38 PM, Jeff Langr [email protected]
[extremeprogramming] <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Adam,
>
> I love the point about learning to pair live first.
>
> The isolation thing is not trivial--after longer periods of working
> remotely, you can start to lose important social connection and develop
> somewhat antisocial habits, attitudes, and feelings. In my case, I think I
> was started to get depressed, even with the pairing.
>
> On the flip side: We paired a bit too much at Outpace (where I was
> remote), on average 7 hours per day. It was effective, but I wasn't getting
> opportunities to explore on my own, which for me is important. By day end,
> I was so beat that I had zero interest in wanting to touch a computer after
> work. I barely blogged or tweeted for about two years as a result.
>
> (We were slamming through a lot of new, different technologies, too, which
> contributed greatly to my brain fatigue.)
>
> This isn't the first time, either; three different long-term experiences
> with all-day (7+ hour, 8-10 hours in one place) pairing convinced me that
> 6--remote or live--should be plenty for most mortals.
>
> Regards,
> Jeff
>
> here's a recent blog entry on this BTW: http://langrsoft.com/2016/08/
> 23/pairing-hell/
> --
> Langr Software Solutions, Inc.
> http://langrsoft.com
>
> Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java (http://pragprog.com/book/utj2)
> Modern C++ Programming with TDD (http://pragprog.com/book/lotdd)
> Agile in a Flash (http://pragprog.com/book/olag)
> Agile Java: Crafting Code with Test-Driven Development (
> http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131482394)
> Essential Java Style (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0130850861)
>
> Adam Sroka [email protected] [extremeprogramming]
> <[email protected]>
> October 13, 2016 at 3:45 PM via Postbox
> <https://www.postbox-inc.com/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=sumlink&utm_campaign=reach>
> __._,_
>
>
>