Symphonious

If you want to reap the benefits of pairing in terms of sharing knowledge around your team, you need to make sure you change pair regularly. We've been working on the basis that one pair works on a story until it's done - mostly because we only have a small number of engineers and a large number of projects that we need to work on.

The problem is, we're not sharing knowledge enough. Instead of one person knowing about that new section of code, now two do, but the rest of the team still doesn't so we tend to want to get one or both of those two to fix any issues that come up or add any improvements. It's not a team ownership thing anymore, it's a pair ownership.

So we've managed to get three of us to start pairing regularly and most importantly, rotating pairs at least every half a day. We've only been trying it for a day and a bit so it's too early to say exactly how much impact it has, but I already feel like I have more of an idea of what the other two have been doing the past couple of weeks. We've also discovered a potential problematic area where different approaches could be used, so we know to pay attention to how it goes and work out which approach is better.

For just over a day of interrupted work, that's a pretty positive outcome so far. It will be interesting to see how it progresses and how we can pull the other members of the team into the pairing pool and still cover all the different things we need to work on.

We've begun testing out Hamachi at work as a substitute for our defunct VPN and it's showing a lot of promise. It sets up a peer-to-peer VPN which is quite clever and simple to get working. When combined with installing Bonjour on the Windows boxes (Macs have it pre-installed) and tweaking the DNS settings to add .local to the search domains, the DNS look-up works brilliantly cross-platform as well.

I've now got access to all the important stuff from work to tinker with my little side-projects while still being able to store them in the work subversion repository so others can join in if they want. It's an awful lot simpler to work with than the old VPN stuff too.

The only problem I've seen is every so often some of the peers in the network fail to be connected to and it doesn't ever seem to retry.  Since you mostly only need to connect to the servers instead of everyone who happens to be using Hamachi to VPN in, it usually doesn't matter but it does make me wonder about the reliability.