Re: Any advice on remote pairing?

On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 7:42 AM, Ron Jeffries [email protected]
[extremeprogramming] <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> Steven,
>
> On Oct 14, 2016, at 5:44 PM, Steven Gordon [email protected]
> [extremeprogramming] <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The original question is about remote pairing for a fully distributed
> team.  I can see mandating pairing (as well as the other XP practices) as a
> prerequisite for taking the risk of investing in a fully distributed team.
>
>
> Yes, well … except that ...
>
> Mandating is probably never a really great team-building idea, and …
>
> Pair programming, as marvelous as we think it is, isn’t a proven path to
> success and in a remote situation, even if it’s as good as we think, may
> not be close to good enough.
>
>
Ron,

Distribution is an even worse team-building idea.  So bad an idea that it
is very likely that the group will effectively never become an team.  So
bad an idea that it is much more likely that members of the work group will
leave for better opportunities at inconvenient times.

Having a "bus number" of 1 is extremely risky for a distributed work
group.  The reason to mandate pairing is not necessarily for the
traditional team-building and quality-improvement aspects of learning to
pair well, but just to increase the chance that when a person leaves the
work group, there is at least one other person who has some knowledge of
any particular part of the code that later needs repair or extension.