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Via the Agile Toolkit Podcast I discovered the article Promiscuous Pairing and Beginner’s Mind: Embrace Inexperience by Arlo Belshee. It’s been a while since I’ve read such an interesting article!

Arlo describes how Silver Platter have experimented with different approaches to pair programming and task ownership/distribution. And most of their findings are not what you expect, and often they contradict commonly held truths. Some of them are:

• assigning tasks to the least qualified worked better long term than assigning to the most qualified or randomly
• team ownership of the tasks (team accountability) worked better than individual ownership (individual accountability)
• task grabbing (pull) worked better than assignment (push)
• swapping pairs each 90 minutes was most productive
• for time between swaps of one hour to a day it was more productive if the one who had been with the task the longest switches task than if one stayed with a task until its completion

Go read the whole article now!

Oh, and that they use C++ makes it even more interesting!