Pair Coaching

Not an ExtremeProgramming practice, and I wonder why. -- HaskoHeinecke

Can XP make effective use of a PairingCoach??

Please can you give an outline of how this would be practiced?

Maybe the same way professional sports teams use assistant coaches? or movies have assistant directors? Doesn't really seem the same as PairProgramming though since the coaches and assistant coaches wouldn't be walking around together.

Rogier van Sterkenburg and I taught an XP class a couple of weeks ago and we did pair coaching. This left each of us more time to pair with the other programmers. We thought we'd spend half our time programming and half our time coaching, but it didn't turn out that way. The students had lots of questions and there were a lot of little fires to fight. I'm glad I didn't have to do the coaching alone. -- MartijnMeijering

I think it's not an XP practice because the official practices were handed down by KentBeck, who is capable of solo coaching, and the prime example of a coach is RonJeffries, who is also capable of solo coaching. It was probably just an oversight. I think PairCoaching sounds like a great idea for groups AdoptingXp. Solo coaching sure seems daunting when you're not an XP guru.

Not all situations are the same. Environments set up specially to teach XP to people with no experience in it should be different from stable XP development environments where the XP learning curve is not the main feature. In general, teaching labs is hard work (if the lab's any good).

I think this argument from experience <>solo coaching is not XP minded. It is exactly the same argument used by programmers who don't want to PairProgram. I think it has more to do with the maturity of the team. (As in a Team versus a group of people working together.)

I find it very intriging to see that people find it normal that you always have 2 parents for one child, but only one manager or coach for a bunch of people. It is hard to think about everything when you program, as a coach it is even harder. I have created a workshop on leadership and it goes a lot easier for our leaders, since we introduced pair-coaching.

http://www.paircoaching.net/

-- YvesHanoulle?

IndustrialLogic's ExtremeExchange? (http://industriallogic.com/xp/exchange.html) is an XP coaching service we offer to customers. We provide one or two (pair) coaches, and we prefer to pair-coach, but not every client wants 2 coaches. -- JoshuaKerievsky

That system alternates coaches over weeks. The drawbacks are mismatches between the two coach's curriculum, and reduced learning between the coaches. --PhlIp