At one of our regular retrospectives a few iterations back, the team decided that we had a bad habit of not rotating our pairs enough. More specifically, we tended to pair with the same few people for all of our tasks. That meant we could improve the sharing our knowledge to other team member.
Perryn Fowler was charged with trying to rectify the situation, and he drew this chart up on a whiteboard shortly afterwards:
The idea here is that you put a mark in the square that intersects your initials and your pairs. We didn't enforce any rules other than that. Instead, we just let people come to the realisation that they were filling in some squares a lot, and others not so much.
Comments
I like this... plain, simple, effective.
Posted by: Robert Watkins | March 6, 2004 06:14 PM
JY doesn't pair with ANYBODY
Posted by: scot | March 6, 2004 08:42 PM
Yeah - Jas got allocated almost full time to another project...
Posted by: Marty Andrews | March 6, 2004 09:36 PM
Probably worthwhile indicating that in some way, Marty... I mean, I know that the team members all know that JY wasn't available, but if, say, management was to come down and see the chart, they might not ask, but walk away with the wrong impression.
Depends on how political pair programming is in your place, I guess.
Oh, and I'm going to steal this idea. File off the serial numbers, and I'll be able to pass it off as own of my own. :)
Posted by: Robert Watkins | March 6, 2004 10:28 PM
That wasn't (and isn't) necessary on our project, but I can certainly imagine situations where that might be the case.
I'm glad you're gonna give it a go. By all means take it as your own. I won't have any shame in grabbing one of yours someday ;)
Posted by: Marty Andrews | March 7, 2004 12:02 AM
Another curiosity in the chart.
Reading across MA didn't pair with TV nor SM,
but TV reported pairing with MA and
SM reported pairing with MA twice!
Hmm, the chart is twice as big as needs to be,
but helps to track recording errors.
Posted by: Paul H | December 3, 2004 07:37 AM
1. isn't one dimension the owner of the story.
2. perryn is a he. I hate english! I always thought it was she.
Posted by: massive | March 26, 2005 08:24 AM