Saturday, January 28, 2006
This is not exactly NEW news, as it's from
last year's Agile conference, but I stumbled across it today after reading a post on Jim Shore's blog calling for
experience report submissions for
this year's Agile Conference. found it a really interesting case study on experimenting with agile techniques to find the most productive process. Some of the more interesting points were:
- After experimenting with pairing time periods from 30 minutes to a full week before swapping pairs, 90 minutes proved to be the most productive.
- Keeping taks at a particular station, and alternately swapping out pairs (so that one programmer would be at the station for 3 hours, before she swapped to a new station) was the most effective method for assigning tasks (they also tried assigning tasks to individual programmers and pairs).
- Perhaps most interesting, they found that encouraging programmers to pick tasks that they were LEAST familiar with resulted in more productivity, less refactoring, and better quality.
The summary can be found
here (scroll down to the article titled "
Promiscuous Pairing"). Also, there is a PDF available of the
full report.
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agile,
scrum