Re: Any advice on remote pairing?

Hi Steven,

Fair enough! But even then, I think the team should be able to subsequently
change or refine practices.

Charlie

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 1:12 PM, Steven Gordon [email protected]
[extremeprogramming] <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> 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
>>
>> 
>