Sunday, July 19, 2009

Pair it is the law!

There are some obvious benefits to pairing: Shared knowledge, keeping on task, holding each other accountable, reduced bad design/code. It is all about quality. When we make a mistake we live with it forever.

My wife works in heath care. She treats patients who have prostate cancer, with some sort of hugely expensive equipment that produces radiation. So when it comes time for a patient to receive treatment, how many people are involved in the treatment? Two, that is right two.

I have been so busy thinking about how as software developers we are changing the way we do our work. I didn't even notice that my wife pairs every day of the week. In fact she has regulations against treating a patient by herself. The medical community doesn't want people to make mistakes.

Why do we as programmers need to re-educate developers to not code alone? There are all sorts of regulations around treating patients with medical equipment. Shouldn't we consider our work just a critical? I say get that Bill to congress!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Doug,

This is an interesting point. I have a couple of questions:

Did your wife at some point worked alone? If so, how was her transition from working alone to pairing all the time?

Can she experience the same fear that programmers have when they pair? The feeling that the person next to you is going to know that you suck?

I am all for pairing but I mostly lean on the hippie side of things: I pair because I believe in it, not because it's mandatory. Actually making it mandatory might make me want to stop pairing. However, I know a bunch of people that need to be told or they won't do it. This might help them to get started, but as they say "Even a dead fish can go with the flow".

Doug Bailey said...

For as long as she has been giving Radiation treatments, she has been pairing. She doesn't know any different, it is just how she does her work. For some reason it took me years to see that her job requires 2 people to avoid critical mistakes.

I guess this is like getting pairing under your fingers. If it is the only way you have ever know your job, you don't even consider the alternative.

At one point doctors didn't wash up before surgery. Now they would think you crazed if you told them they could probably perform more procedures if they didn't waste time washing.

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