Extreme Programming Pair Generator

At Resolver Systems, we practice Extreme Programming. If you're doing the same, you may find the spreadsheet on this page useful.

One of the core rules of XP is that you should move people around, to avoid situations where only a few people understand part of the system. We do that by having a rule that the same two people can never pair together for two days running. The problem with that rule is that it can get pretty hard to work out who should work with whom every morning... so, being developers - and in particular, the developers of Resolver One - we coded a spreadsheet in it to solve the problem. Here it is:

• Programming pair generator (right-click and save to disk).

To set it up for your team, enter the names of the of the people in your team into the first column. If you have more people than can fit into the space, go to Data/Edit Names and change the size of the ranges availableCol, ownerCol, and people.

Once this is done, every day you can use it to generate a set of pairs:

• In the Available? column enter "n" against anyone who is not able to do development work today - for example, people who are on vacation.
• In the Owner? column, enter "y" against anyone who owns a user story.
• In the Previous pairs box, enter the pairs from yesterday.

And that's it! The Today's pairs box will contain the pairs for today, and the Lucky spiker box will show anyone who is left over when an odd number of people are available. ("Spiker" because they can work on spiking future development rather than pairing on production code.)

We hope you find it helpful.