Steve Eichert

Promiscuous Pairing and switching every 90 minutes

posted Saturday, January 28, 2006 10:20 AM

Brian pointed to an experience report from last year's agile conference that a number of people at our office have talked about since we started pairing a couple months ago. One of the points that Brian highlighted was:

After experimenting with pairing time periods from 30 minutes to a full week before swapping pairs, 90 minutes proved to be the most productive.

My question is this, how is it possible to switch pairs every 90 minutes and still stay productive? We try to switch every 4 hours or so but we often end up going longer because people are about to finish something and in order to get a new person up to speed we'd have to spend a bunch of time reviewing what was already done. Hrm, perhaps that is point. If you spend too much time working on a single thing with a pair it takes too long to get someone else up to speed. If, however, you only spend 90 minutes there is much less to get the pair up to speed on. The other advantage is that if you force yourself to switch every 90 minutes there is less likelihood of a pair getting stuck on something since a fresh set of eyes will roll into the pair. Don't you love when you start a post with one intention but end up with something completely different?