Are You Changing Pairs Often Enough?

If you want to reap the benefits of pairing in terms of sharing knowledge around your team, you need to make sure you change pair regularly. We’ve been working on the basis that one pair works on a story until it’s done – mostly because we only have a small number of engineers and a large number of projects that we need to work on.

The problem is, we’re not sharing knowledge enough. Instead of one person knowing about that new section of code, now two do, but the rest of the team still doesn’t so we tend to want to get one or both of those two to fix any issues that come up or add any improvements. It’s not a team ownership thing anymore, it’s a pair ownership.

So we’ve managed to get three of us to start pairing regularly and most importantly, rotating pairs at least every half a day. We’ve only been trying it for a day and a bit so it’s too early to say exactly how much impact it has, but I already feel like I have more of an idea of what the other two have been doing the past couple of weeks. We’ve also discovered a potential problematic area where different approaches could be used, so we know to pay attention to how it goes and work out which approach is better.

For just over a day of interrupted work, that’s a pretty positive outcome so far. It will be interesting to see how it progresses and how we can pull the other members of the team into the pairing pool and still cover all the different things we need to work on.