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