Re: Any advice on remote pairing?

Of course, the team can decide to do what they think works best.

By mandate, I mean somebody outside the team making and enforcing a
decision.

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 1:17 PM, Charlie Poole [email protected]
[extremeprogramming] <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> 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
>>>
>>>
> 
>