EffectivePairing

From SPA Wiki

The Effective Pairing workshop explored the use of pair working for tasks other than programming.

Analysis of questionnaires

There's an excel spreadsheet here File:EffectivePairing1.xls. It contains analysis over both the effective pairing workshop held at the conference and the re-run at miniSPA2008.

The quick summary:

Commentary

• Over the course of the workshop, people became more convinced of the benefits of pairing for creative tasks
• They became less convinced that pairing is useful in all situations
• For other tasks, their views didn't change much during the workshop

• There was strong consensus that the scheduling task is better suited to pairing.
• There was a mild consensus that painting is better paired.
• For the other tasks, most people thought that they were best done the way that they did them!

• There was strong consensus that pairing is more fun

Feedback gathered at the end

What went well:

• Exercises were well chosen
• Session was well prepared
• Doing the analytic scheduling exercise in a pair went better than expected
• The session kept participants engaged

Not so well:

• Results inconclusive (small data set)
• Better if each person got to do all four exercises as both pair member and singleton (but how?)
• Questionnaires need improvement
• Don't let participants keep the initial questionnaire during the session, so they can't refer back to it at the end

Puzzles:

• Proper pairing versus "2 people assigned to a task" (e.g. write-edit-review cycle done by two people)

Actions:

• Revise the questionnaires
• Fix the error in the scheduling exercise
• Some people went away determined to try pair working in more activities
• Some people went away determined to try pair writing
• Some people went away determined to avoid one-to-one for personnel interviews