What if we rotate pairs every day?

“Lack of empathy, alignment and communication makes pairing difficult”

Frequent pair rotation can be a powerful tool in building stronger team dynamics. Initially, a lack of empathy and alignment can make pairing challenging, especially when team members are unfamiliar with each other's working patterns, pace, and areas of expertise. However, by switching pairs frequently, team members have the opportunity to get to know one another better, and quickly. This familiarity makes it easier to empathize and align with each other, ultimately fostering stronger bonds within the team. Moreover, the practice of frequent pair rotation encourages a culture of feedback. We suggested that team members intentionally share feedback during short sessions at the end of their pairing sessions, contributing to continuous improvement and better collaboration.

“There are a lot of interruptions to pairing time”

Teams reported challenges in pairing due to frequent interruptions caused by a lack of long periods of uninterrupted working time. To address this issue, the teams established core working hours in the afternoon during which interruptions are minimized. As a result, meetings got shifted to the morning or the end of the day. Additionally, pairs within the team utilized the Pomodoro Technique or other explicit timeboxing methodology to maximize their efficiency and productivity during their limited working time.

“Switching pairs everyday makes us slower”

There is a notion that increasing the frequency of rotations results in a decline in delivery performance, as perceived by the product team. They tend to believe that more rotation leads to reduced efficiency and slower output.

There also exists a developer perception that frequent rotations introduce additional overhead, consequently slowing down the team. This is attributed to the need to consistently share the evolving context of ongoing work, which is perceived as a time-consuming process.

However, proponents of more frequent rotations argue that sharing context becomes more efficient as the frequency increases. This is attributed to the fact that there is typically less contextual information to communicate if pair switching is done frequently. Moreover, the efficiency of sharing context is further enhanced when every team member possesses a more comprehensive understanding of ongoing tasks. In addition, frequent pair switches creates an opportunity for team members to establish processes to facilitate context sharing.

The practice of frequent rotation becomes more manageable and streamlined over time. As the team becomes accustomed to this approach, the initial challenges associated with frequent rotation diminish, making the process progressively easier and more effective.

“Context sharing is easy and quick when you do it more often”

One concern that we heard from all three teams was that swapping pair members on work in progress would lead to a problem of sharing context with the new pair member. In fact, for each team this seemed to be the strongest motivation for long-lived pairs.

In each team’s board we found that this concern would be raised in the first couple of days. Team members would suggest common ways to make context sharing easier, and by the end of the experiment it was no longer a concern. A practice that emerged in each team was to have pairs end their day by adding a note to the card itself, briefly capturing the work and decisions completed that day. They might also add or remove items from a to-do list also maintained in the card. These simple practices helped the card itself to carry the context of the work in progress, rather than having that context reside with specific team members.

We found that each team discovered new practices related to the cards. In our daily discussions the team members would ask for more context to be held in the card, smaller cards, and ongoing comments in the cards.

“Information is flowing through the team”

This is one of the more exciting and insightful comments we heard. Teams discovered that, in practice, it did not take very long for an anchor to share context with a new pair at the start of a coding session. There was not a lot of new context to share. Also, teams found it was easier to understand any card after working on many other cards of the team’s backlog. Frequent pair rotations accelerate this experience gain as team members are able to work on a wider variety of tasks every week.

“Knowledge silos are impossible to maintain”

Each team included members of different experience levels and areas of expertise. The teams initially thought of this diversity as a challenge for frequent pair rotations. Prior to the experiment, each team was organizing pairs and the cards assigned to pairs with consideration of who is a junior or senior team member, who is a front-end, back-end or devops specialist, who has prior experience working in a particular area of the codebase, and so on. Maintaining this complex matrix made it difficult to switch pairs frequently, and reinforced knowledge silos in the team.

It was impossible to maintain these rules with the daily pair rotations of the experiment. With pairs rotating every day, team members were forced to work in unfamiliar areas of the codebase. In addition, there was far less risk for any team member working in an unfamiliar area since that member would only stay on a card for a day or two before passing it to someone else.

Our teams found that frequent pair rotations leveled the experience impact people have on cards. Longer-term team members could remove blockers from newer members and share knowledge that help accelerate their growth and learning curve of the codebase and development tools.

A few months after the experiment, one team gave us some interesting feedback: They found that when a problem came up in production, they didn't need to depend on just one person to look into and fix it. The team could assign anyone to troubleshoot the issue. In addition, another feedback mentioned an incoming pair rotation brought new context that changed implementation direction and helped resolve a problem in the early stages of the feature’s development, thus saving the team lots of time and rework. These highlight the benefits of having knowledge spread among the team.

“The work is moving among the team members”

Team members found that everyone developed context related to all the cards in progress, even before working on each card. This increased the effectiveness of the daily standup sessions: Team members would share insights, identify risks in advance and help each other in removing blockers. This is only possible when all developers have enough context and ownership of all cards in play. No single individual owns any piece of work, and everyone in the team is responsible for the progress of the tasks as a whole.