Exploring Synergistic Impact Through Adventures In Group Pairing

Level: Practicing

As Agile practitioners, a great deal of our time is focused on having targeted, directed impact. But sometimes we miss opportunities to repurpose our efforts into syngergistic, many-pronged effects. Not multi-tasking — multi-EFFECTing, from one piece of effort. This talk will explore this topic, both in theory and in practice. We will examine a particular client case-study, where two disparate 6-person developer teams, with minimal pairing and TDD experience, were developed into highly-productive “gelled” teams, through “Group Pair Programming” — 6 individuals, 1 workstation.

Process/Mechanics
Learning outcomes
  • Group Pairing has phenomenal impact on a felt sense of “whole team”
  • While Group Pairing may sound intimidating, it actually works wonders for making even the timid and apprehensive feel comfortable
  • Using an inanimate focus object (“rubber duck”) helps deflect interpersonal struggles
  • A single iteration of Group Pairing, and subsequently breaking out into standard pairs of 2 or 3, never seems to lose the sense of “we’re all in this together”
  • Group Pairing engages every single developer in not just the coding, but also the design decisions process.
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