Re: Any advice on remote pairing?

Regarding mandating anything, I believe there is one time when it is
appropriate - at interview/hiring/team-forming time.

"We are creating a organization (or team) that will follow such and such
practices.  Are you interested in joining?".


On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 12:51 PM, Charlie Poole [email protected]
[extremeprogramming] <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
>