Against 100% Pair Programming
Vivek Singh has an interesting post talking about the problems he has found with pair programming. In an excellent pliant manner, he points out that he is not totally against pair programming, but that he has come across some flaws which he can’t ignore.
To quote Vivek:
… once I have come up to speed with codebase and I am not making too many mistakes, which needs to reviewed in realtime, I think its time to stop pairing 100% of time. Now this stage is reached too many times in project but we do not recognize this and we stop being agile.
Agile - In Theory
The current Agile backlash is getting a lot of traction on the web lately. We’ve been contacted by or come across lots of people who agree with us and this site has got more hits in the last two months then it has since it was started.
I’ve also read several blog posts, articles and comments attempting to define Agile in one way or another and they all sound so good. Here’s a small sample:
From Andy Hunt of the Pragmatic Programmers in a recent SD Times article:
“Agile development uses feedback to make constant adjustments in a highly collaborative environment.”
From SteveH:
Hi, I’m Steve Hayes, and I do agile development. It’s an inclusive, people-centred approach to doing iterative, incremental software development. It uses a combination of technical and social practices to increase collaboration and reduce feedback cycles. Agile development works best with an experienced team, as do most development methodologies. For the best results, agile practices should be customised to suit the strengths and weaknesses of your team, and the peculiarities of your domain. Agile development is not suitable for every project, or even every team. It has strengths, and it has weaknesses. There is no silver bullet.
From a comment by Kerry Buckley on Obie Fernandez’s blog.
It seems to me that discarding and adding practices to suit a specific project is the very essence of agile, providing you’ve worked with the “standard” practices enough to know why you’re changing them.
These are all great comments. I only wish they reflected what Agile development has become in the real world. These are great theoretical statements about Agile, and indeed they capture my original thinking and excitement when I first encountered Agile. However, they are theory only and as noted elsewhere on this and other sites, Agile development has become much less about being agile and more about following a certain set of practices that have been deemed “Agile”.