Re: Any advice on remote pairing?

Let me restate my position.

I have had pretty good success as a coach facilitating Scrum teams to
discover the need for engineering practices in order to meet their
responsibility and then adopt much of XP.  Over the years I have gotten a
lot of pushback on this very group about not adopting XP from the
beginning, but I believe the team continues with XP more successfully when
it was their idea instead of mine. The team also learns inspect and adapt
before I have to move on, because there are actual problems to learn from
and fix.

That has worked pretty well for co-located Scrum teams and even partly
co-located teams (ones where less than half the members are remote).  Maybe
it is just me, but I have not had anything but failures facilitating the
transition from vanilla Scrum to XP with fully distributed work groups that
were not already a mature team.

So, for fully distributed work groups, I now believe adopting/training XP
from the beginning is the better tradeoff (while still preferring the Scrum
to XP transition for co-located or mostly co-located teams).  This means
mandating pairing, TDD, group code ownership, CI, etc. from the beginning.
I believe this is the right tradeoff, because it increases the chance that
the group will gel into a team despite the lack of face-to-face
interactions, and even if that never happens, the XP practices will protect
some of the value of the work.

Gordon