Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Xp Team sizing... Even or Odd

Yesterday, we had our sprint retrospective which brought one interesting issue.

We are team of 5 dev, 2 tester and 1 project co-ordinator.

One of the issue we have been facing since very beginning is lack of pair programming which resulted in knowledge silos getting build in the team. With extra effort and quoting past examples I succeeded in showing value in pair programming and we started doing it gradually more and more.

However last sprint's result was surprising to me. We had total 12 user stories in sprint and out of that I did 4 stories alone and then contributed for 3 more stories.

Now with the team of 5 developer, that sounds little ODD to me. So I tried to investigate this in the retrospective session. To my surprise, I heard other developers talking about working in pairs (2 pairs out of 4 developer) and their story comes out to be extra complex than what was originally thought of. So I was the ODD man out from the pair programming this time, for whole sprint.

This gives me interesting question. Should XP team always be Even size to facilitate pair programming? May be YES. (While voting for yes, I am well aware of the fact that even size might give us tie in planning session while estimating story point. My answer to this is use Feast-To-Five technique)

Anybody would like to comment? I love hearing from like minded peoples!!!!!

Develop smartly :)

1 comment:

John said...

It's an interesting question. But I think you can survive with an odd number. You really need to work on swapping out the people so that same people do not always pair together. That way you won't always be the odd man out.

Good work on introducing pair programming. I know it can be difficult to convince some people