Re: Any advice on remote pairing?

"George Dinwiddie [email protected] [extremeprogramming]" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.programming.extreme-programming
Organization iDIA Computing, LLC
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Jay,

I'm not sure about the "hold the team to their decisions" part.

I worked with an org where the first team I coached, they were told to 
pair program. They rarely did and when they did, it tended to be the 
same two people pairing all the time. Retro after retro they decided 
they had to get better at pairing, but did nothing about it.

The next team I coached in the same org, I cautioned against pushing 
pairing so hard. Instead, we set up the furniture to make pairing easy 
and let them know we thought pairing was a good idea. They moved in and 
out of pairing rather fluidly. Sometimes there were 3 people working at 
one computer. Sometimes there were two people working side-by-side on 
two parts of the same story, but constantly talking about what they did. 
At one point the entire team was working closely on one story that had 
turned out to be more difficult than they had imagined.

My learning is to make it easy to do what you think is the right thing, 
but also make it easy for the team to change their minds. Focus them on 
the outcomes (and impacts) that are desired. Encourage them to talk 
about the activities that lead to those outcomes. And be patient.

  - George

On 10/14/16 4:49 PM, Jay Bazuzi [email protected] [extremeprogramming] wrote:
>
>
> "it should ideally be a team decision"
>
> This is so important.
>
> Managers, it's up to you to relinquish control over how the team works.
> Let the team select a decision-making mechanism (Decider from the Core
> Protocols is a reasonable default.) Then hold the team to their
> decisions until they decide to change them. Don't undermine their
> decisions, even if you disagree with them.
>
> Warning: If your organization recognizes/rewards performance
> individually, this can backfire.
>
> -J

-- 
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   * George Dinwiddie *                      http://blog.gdinwiddie.com
   Software Development                    http://www.idiacomputing.com
   Consultant and Coach                    http://www.agilemaryland.org
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------



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Posted by: George Dinwiddie <[email protected]>
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