Re: [extremeprogramming] Pairing styles

In 2003, I paired daily on a fairly strict XP team as a traveling 
consultant at HEB in San Antonio. Well, not quite daily--many of us did 
9/80 (80 hours across 9 days) so that we could salvage more weekend time 
with family. Most days stretched to 9 or 10 hours of pairing as a 
result. I learned a lot about pairing during that stint--much of it in 
the form of "what not to do." Such as: pair for 9-10 hours straight.

Pairing helped keep me engaged and energized across such long days, but 
it did pretty much wipe me out regularly. (I was 39 at the time.) After 
HEB I started pushing no more than  5-6 hours of pairing daily. I did 
near 8 hours remote pairing daily from 2013-2016, but found that I 
really wanted to be done after about 6-7 hours.

The 7-month HEB stint was also where, after promoting pairing for a 
couple years as an Object Mentor consultant, I was seeing what pairing 
really felt like as a day-to-day team member for an extended period of 
time. It's where I truly transitioned from not really being thrilled 
with the practice to "there's a lot of cool benefits here." Tim & I 
wrote a 2011 PragPub article about the benefits: 
https://pragprog.com/magazines/2011-07/pair-programming-benefits.

Over the years I noted a few more benefits, but also began to gather a 
list of "management overhead" elements that pairing incurred. When I 
started doing more mobbing, I realized that it generally eliminates of a 
lot of these concerns: troublesome pairings, context switching overhead 
(which does bring some positives), what to do with the odd pair, what to 
do with solo-dev'd stuff, etc. Nowadays I greatly prefer to mob, though 
I once again find that 6 hours is plenty.

What's also interesting: Mobbing seems to foster a lot less active 
resistance from both devs and managers.

Jeff

J. B. Rainsberger wrote on 10/29/19 3:28 AM:
> I tend to like the Back-Seat Driver approach when I'm explicitly 
> teaching and I tend to like the older pairing style when building 
> thing together without explicit teaching.
>
> Also, have you noticed changes in your stamina while pairing?
>
> I remember (in my late 20s!) feeling exhausted by Friday morning when 
> I paired more than 1/2 time at a day job on a project, but now (in my 
> mid-40s) I can easily work in a mob for 4 straight hours with some 
> combination of explicit teaching and project work. I know there are a 
> number of confounding factors in there, but I'd expect to feel _more_ 
> tired, not less, as I age.
> -- 
> J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger :: tdd.training <https://tdd.training> :: 
> jbrains.ca <https://www.jbrains.ca> ::
> blog.thecodewhisperer.com <https://blog.thecodewhisperer.com>
> _._,_._,


<http://langrsoft.com> 	
Jeff Langr/ Langr Software Solutions, Inc. <https://twitter.com/jlangr> 
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