Pair Non Believers With Believers

You want to AdoptPairProgramming, but the number of XP non-believers is high.

Therefore,

Evidence/Examples

: We learned to always pair a believer with a non-believer; two non-believers will not actually pair together. The non-believers will not only remain non-believers, but will become adamant about it as well. We also discovered that learning to pair program was easier when the believer was more experienced in the technique. We realized the implication of this was that a new project would require at least one experienced XP person.

This matches my experience when I tried (and failed) to introduce PairProgramming at a previous employer. In the best case the non-believing pair will at least help each other a little, but mostly you'll find one person programming and one person trying to stay awake. You need to know how to do pair programming for it to work.

The essential thing here is not some religious believing vs. not believing, it is about knowing how to pair program. It is a skill that has to be learned. Trying pair programming without any idea about how to do it can be a very unconfortable experience, that will create "non-believers".

I think it's actually a combination of believing (in the trust-your-instincts sense, not the religious sense), and knowing how. Simply knowing how isn't going to help if you don't believe that it's worth your time to do it. I know from personal experience that some people are natural PairProgrammers who still don't believe that it's worth their time. To them it's a good way to get a newbie up to speed, but after that it's time to sit in your own cubicle and do some real work. They don't believe that PairProgramming has benefits beyond orientation. One of these programmers I worked with recently; we were working on a relatively hard problem and had to keep trading off the driver's seat when one person hit a road-block. The other would take over, and by the time he hit his own road block, the first would be back into it and ready to drive again. This particular programmer said to me, "I'm beginning to see how useful this is. I can see how if we were both working separately we wouldn't have got nearly as much work done."

AdoptingXpPatternLanguage

CategoryPattern | CategoryExtremeProgramming | CategoryAdoptingXp