Archive for July, 2008

Step away from the keyboard, and put your hands where I can see them

Friday, July 4th, 2008

When we let participants pair program in courses, it is always difficult to make them stop… Over time we have experimented with various techniques. Marc and I are at the ESSAP summer school this week, and we needed to pull out all the stops – they were that focused :)

Techniques we used to get people to stop

  • Pomodori (kitchen timer set to 25 minutes, with 5 minutes in between), it makes noise, so some people stop.
  • Marc’s Horn – this gets some more peoples attention
  • and finally this:

I shout “Step away from the keyboard, and put your hands where I can see them!”.

That gets everybody’s attention (and laughs). We are having good fun, and seem to have found a good way to explain refactoring when you are almost having some tests :) (more about that later, hopefully).

More pictures from this session (including the retrospective stickers)

Posted in people & systems, wrestling with programs | Comments Off