Promiscuous Pairing and Beginner’s Mind: Embrace Inexperience

I’ve been listening to the Agile Toolkit’s Pod cast featuring Arlo Belshee and his experience on Promiscuous Pairing and the Least Qualified implementer.

Now what can be so interesting about pair programming you ask?

Well, in the podcast Arlo talks about how his team started to experiment with the XP processes and found that when they used metrics to measure how well they where doing when Pair programming, they found that using a concept of “Beginners Mind” when pair programming by making sure they have a least qualified member in a pairing all the time they where able to greatly improve their productivity.

So how does it work?

A pair of programmers will start out with the least qualified developer paired with another developer working on a specific piece of code, then after 90 minutes the most qualified developer in the pairing moves on to another pairing and become the least qualified developer. The developer left in the original pairing becomes the most qualified developer and thus become the teacher for the new developer in the pairing. Thus the new developer is now the least qualified developer in the pairing. And so after 90 minutes, the cycle starts over…

It is really quite interesting and thought provoking when you listen to the conversation and read the paper.

tags: xp, testing, pairprogramming

Currently listening to: p *** 536. delerium – silence(dj tiesto mix)

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