Hi guys, few weeks ago I wrote a couple of blogs about pair programming: “Intro Pair Programming” and “Ping Pong programming“, I believe these techniques are extremely useful to share a knowledge within a team.
This week I will explain how you can enable Pair Programming rotation. This idea was taken from the book Agile Coaching from Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley as well as the picture below. I believe pair programming is not enough, we need to enable pairs to change within a team, otherwise we will end up in a situation where only some pairs know a part of a product.
A trick is to work with the team to design a “big visible chart” to increase a visibility of what they want to track; in this case partners with whom they paired. This makes it easy for the team to see whether they are improving or not.
In this case team can use a pairing ladder to show who is paired with who and how often. Below you can find an example of this pairing ladder.
This was a short post to give you some ideas how can you enable/track pair rotation within your team.
Hope it´s useful.
I would love to get a star rating for this post:
So explain the blacked out boxes. It appears Van and Steve will never work together.
Sorry I really did not get your question :) There is a blank space between Van and Steve so of course they can work together :)
Could you explain better what you mean?
Cheers,
Luis
It doesn’t look like Mike can work with anyone, is that correct? How can this chart track who Mike has worked with?
Please take a look into the first colum.
This one is really really good. Maybe with 4 devs is a little bit over kill (there are just a few possible combinations) but with 6 or more devs it is definitely a must have!
Great tool! :)
Thanks Pedro :)
Luis, this is very good, thanks for sharing! Have you thought of a way of color coding it to make the next pair choice more obvious and trigger pair reflection?
I was thinking about using a traffic light scheme and decide after how many times 2 people work together trigger changing from green to amber and amber to red. You could use this to trigger mini pair-retrospectives at each color change on how well the pair worked and what can be improved.
Excellent idea, I am going to suggest it on Monday!
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