Pairing activities for empower your Teams

A: “Is there a productivity loss in pair activities? and how do we justify (loss) / enlighten (no loss) to clients?”

Q: “there is significant productivity loss in poor quality whether this comes from people missing scenarios and edge cases, misunderstanding requirements, not adhering to common architectural guidelines, poorly written code, poorly running testing or incomplete documentation. All could be good arguments for peer activities as well as good work items review processes as an alternative, but no the main.”

Team works together is far more important than any process 

While a new process can easily improve team productivity by a fraction, enabling your team to work effectively as a cohesive unit can improve productivity by several times.

Improve your projects in five essential ways

1. communication
2. simplicity
3. feedback
4. respect
5. courage

Considere the next aspects as the key to success with Extreme Teams

• Managers, customers, and team members are all equal partners
• in a collaborative team, implementing a simple, yet effective environment
• enabling teams to become highly productive
• The team self-organizes around the problem to solve it as efficiently as possible
• Every small success deepens their respect for the unique contributions of each and every team member
• constantly communicates with your co workers and customers, emphazising teamwork

• customers enjoy being partners in the working process
• team members actively contribute regardless of experience level
• managers concentrate on communication and relationships
• unproductive activities have been trimmed to reduce costs and frustration of everyone involved

Courageously respond to changing requirements and technology

• keeping your design simple and clean
• geting feedback by testing your work starting on day one
• delivering your product/service to the customers as early as possible
• implementing changes as suggested

We can produce work items starting with the first week of development so why not show it to the customer?

• change our management style to be based on getting working items done a little at a time
• we can learn so much more about the project requirements in the context of a working system
• the changes we get this way are usually the most important to implement
• If working item is what you will deliver then measure your progress by how much you have right now

Inspired in http://www.extremeprogramming.org/

Pair activities in Extreme Teams - Snagit