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