So today I decided to drop in on Neal Ford’s Hands-on Agile Development… not so much to learn something new but to be able to get a breath of fresh air of what it’s like on an agile project again. That and I was also interested in checking out the activity he was going to use to help people experience true agile development first hand.
The first part was a quick overview of pair programming and drilling out the fine detail of pair programming consisting of the driver and navigator who constantly swap roles. Also included the fancy slides that show the gains made from pair programming as well as a nice range of modes of pair programming (i.e. when you get into the “flow”, two people thinking and collaborating well, when one is a coach, one is a learner, or even the extremes of “being overwhelmed” and “wasting expert time”).
For the next 40 or so minutes, we paired up and worked on user stories for identifying perfect numbers and other types of numbers. We could pick anything, so I picked jspec and javascript, of course. The problem unfortunately was I wasn’t able to swap out by picking these tools. 
The amazing thing though was that first two I paired with were completely inexperienced with javascript but were able to pick up. My first partner I told to just write some pseudo code of what they thought it took to pass the test and all I had to do was replace her usages of int with var. Then she was able to write the next test herself so it was pretty cool.
Unfortunately, the session ended before it could really complete with a retrospective and demos of the code produced, but it was a good exposure for people weren’t experienced with pair programming or TDD (and I am sure the three people who walked away from pairing with me felt that they learned quite a bit more about javascript and jspec).
Final thoughts? I’d like to see the session run with a much longer scale to give time for the other pieces needed for a team to succeed with agile as well as more time to conduct a retrospective for each iteration. I think it was a little ambitious for a 90 minute session that also introduces the practices.
But it was still pretty solid!
Sounds cool. Mario and I have been talking to Corey Haines about doing a St. Louis Code Retreat later this summer. I’d like to do one regardless of whether he can make it. Would be a full day like this – pairing on the same problem over and over. If you’re interested in helping out, drop me a line.