Pair Switching Degrades over Time
We had a nice talk today about the natural foot-dragging that is common among pair programmers when it comes time to switch partners. It's not really social, as in partners gravitating to each other as buddies. Instead it tends to be more work-related. It does feel socially awkward to tell your partner you want to go work with someone else now. It sometimes does happen that partners who are gung-ho agilists will prefer working together. They prefer partners who allow them to do their work well and will improve them over those who create drag by arguing against testing or refactoring. People get comfortable in a particular task and want to see it through. This is a good feature usually, and certainly is favorable for people who do individual, non-paired work. In an agile team, it's limiting. Someone needs to move on so that there are more eyes/hands/minds in the code. If there is no standup there is no pair switching. If the team relies on assignment from a manage...