Posted by Iwein Fuld in the early evening: May 9th, 2010
Without exception in all teams I’ve developed software in people have expressed their aversion against pair programming. It’s not that developers don’t want to try, or that they don’t believe it will help. On the contrary, they are usually very enthusiastic about trying it and give it more than a fair chance. After a few days they sit alone behind their keyboard coding like zombies with headphones. What’s going on? Is pair programming too hard? Doesn’t it pay off? In this post I’ll try to explain what I think is happening, and I will give you some clear pointers to avoid the traps. At the end I will go into distributed teams and what part of the game changes there.
So what are people saying when they have stopped pair programming and you ask them why:
- I’m faster on my own
- Can’t pair with that guy, he’s getting on my nerves
- Pair programming is too tiring
- We’ve split up the work and we’ll get it done faster if we use two keyboards
- There’s too much background noise
- I’m just slowing her down
Some of this might sound plausible, so let me axe that down first. No you’re not faster on your own, you’re just creating more crap for your colleagues to puzzle over and eventually delete. The code you write alone sucks. That guy that is getting on your nerves is trying to tell you (clumsily) that your code sucks, try to listen to him and you’ll turn into a better programmer. Or maybe you can teach him something and he’ll stop getting on your nerves. If your code is so simple that you can split up the work in advance you’re writing it on too low an abstraction level, or you need to work on this in two pairs. If you’re slowing the other guy down, that’s a good thing. That will prevent him from writing code that you cannot maintain. If you don’t feel worthy of your colleagues code, get over it, or get off the team.
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Posted by Geert Bossuyt mid-afternoon: April 19th, 2010
When two workmen are working on the same house but each of them uses a different plan (Off course they both think they are using the same plan), the house will not end up to be the intended house. Also, these two men will have a very difficult time appreciating each others work. What will you learn if you act perfectly according to the plan and someone tells you it sucks because he’s using another plan? You will either learn that the other guy is stupid, or you will learn that clearly you’re not as good as you thought you were. Both lessons are useless. Neither you, nor your collegue will improve your individual skills or your mutual ability to work together. So, the differences between the two plans will only become bigger. It’s impossible to be succesfull in this way.
Posted by Guido Schoonheim in the wee hours: August 26th, 2009
Agile2009 is the yearly conference of the Agile Alliance. This year we are in the windy city, Chicago. With over 1350 participants, 300 presentations and over 1500 initial submissions, this conference really is the cream of the crop on Agile software development.
This year I had the honor of presenting a case study on Fully Distributed Scrum together with Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of Scrum.
We presented about a Xebia client located in San Francisco working with our office in new Delhi using a single hyperproductive distributed Scrum team! Thats right, hardcore Agile results across all timezones, culture, language etc.
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Posted by ShriKant Vashishtha in the early morning: July 31st, 2009
Recently I got a chance to attend a 2 days architecture conference in Bangalore organized by iCMG. Some very experienced and renowned figures in software world took sessions on architecture and software development. It sounded like a conference on just software architecture but it catered various other topics which could be grouped under Software development in general. If we leave the question of whether the conference should have focused on architecture only, other topics were also quite good and relevant to software development.
Posted by ShriKant Vashishtha mid-morning: June 2nd, 2009
One of the key USPs of pair-programming is – it provides value which is more than simple typing. That includes ACTIVE participation in code-review, knowledge sharing on continual basis, frequent design discussions with minimal distractions etc. If you primarily focus on knowledge sharing, pair-programming essentially provides true form of knowledge sharing as instead of looking at some bulky heartless documents you sit together with a person who has already worked on the subject and can have conversations and design discussions.
Posted by Guido Schoonheim in the early evening: March 9th, 2009
Working distributed is all about handling distance. Geography, culture, methods & tools, timezones, languages are all adding to that distance. Not measured in miles but in people.
How to get a focus on individuals and interactions when your people are distributed across the globe? What is the secret sauce to use to get it running smoothly?
The classical route of bringing this ‘gap’ under control involves adding process and handovers. It actually forces you to go into a waterfall-like model and therefor widens the Gap instead of bridging it. All waste is institutionalized. Sounds like a horror to you? It does to me.
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