Re: Any advice on remote pairing?

"Adam Sroka [email protected] [extremeprogramming]" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.programming.extreme-programming
Message-ID <CALaPUVe+-A4UFCOY0DonqiD_E4iVriKw2_5+rR1+1DNuYKkcSQ@mail.gmail.com>
Mandate has a heavy connotation. I think that the best teams have leaders
within the team who actively encourage the development of their peers. In a
perfect world the advice to learn how to pair comes from them. I think that
there is some advantage to promoting effective leaders into team leadership
positions so as to formally acknowledge this relationship. Unfortunately,
that is not what “Team Lead” means in many organizations. So, maybe we need
a better name.

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
>
> 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/2016/08/2
>> 3/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>
>> __._,_
>>
>>
> 
>
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.