me.andering - Willem van den Ende » essap http://me.andering.com Systems thinking about software development Sun, 23 May 2010 15:07:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Step away from the keyboard, and put your hands where I can see them http://me.andering.com/2008/07/04/step-away-from-the-keyboard-and-put-your-hands-where-i-can-see-them/ http://me.andering.com/2008/07/04/step-away-from-the-keyboard-and-put-your-hands-where-i-can-see-them/#comments Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:36:07 +0000 Willem http://me.andering.com/?p=317 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)

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