Exploring Synergistic Impact through Adventures in Group Pairing

As Agile practitioners, a great deal of our time is focused on having targeted, directed impact. But sometimes we miss opportunities to repurpose our efforts into synergistic, many-pronged effects. Not multi-tasking — multi-effecting, from one piece of effort. This paper will explore this topic, both in theory and in practice, specifically focusing on Group Pairing as an example of this. We will examine a particular client case study, where a disparate developer team, with minimal pairing and TDD experience, was developed into a highly-productive “gelled” team through Group Pairing — six individuals, one workstation.