Re: [extremeprogramming] Pairing styles

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 2:20 PM Jeff Langr <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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.
>

Ooh! Do tell more. :)

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.
>

How much of that, would you say, did the technology contribute to draining
your energy?

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.
>

I would never have guessed 20 years ago that mobbing would be easier to
accept than pairing, given the common objections at the time. We talked
about it at the XP Toronto user group and mostly dismissed it as a pipe
dream. "If 2 is good, then surely 3 would be better...."

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

Any insights there?
-- 
J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger :: https://tdd.training :: http://www.jbrains.ca ::
http://www.thecodewhisperer.com

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