The fact this question continues to come up time and again after all these years prompted me to wonder why the matter hasn’t been settled by now. Thousands of people have tried their hand at pairing in a wide range of circumstances. Some swear by the practice and feel as if something is missing when they must work solo. Others are convinced pairing is pure waste and cannot possibly yield good results. Both opinions are informed by real-world experience. What specific differences in these situations resulted in such radically different outcomes?
Tag: collaboration
Does remote work work?
First, here’s the short version for those poor souls suffering from tl;dr (too lazy, don’t read much) syndrome, that peculiar malaise that characterizes our times:
Can working from home be effective
compared with collocated teams?
Opponents are quick with invective
and full of opinions, it seems.
But what if we increased, in some way,
the ratio of signal to noise?
Could we discover a good way to
routinely deliver with poise?
And now to business.
One of the ongoing debates in the IT world over the past few years has been about the relative merits of team collocation, including intense collaboration, paired work, and continuous osmotic communication, versus solo work, including work from home and other forms of remote work as well as office spaces fitted with individual cubicles. Continue reading Does remote work work?
Words don’t mean what they don’t mean
<rant>
Words don’t have firm, unambiguous, unchanging meanings. This is a source of some frustration for me. The same word can have multiple meanings. Sometimes there are context-dependent meanings. Sometimes there are shades of meaning conveyed by tone of voice. People can have multiple interpretations of the same basic meaning of any given word. Clear communication is more challenging than it might appear to be.
In the field of software development, we have an unfortunate habit of re-using old words to represent new concepts. Maybe it’s because we value re-use (whatever that means). The English word, agile already had a meaning before software developers came along and started using it for something else. A ballerina is agile. A faun is agile. That’s easy to understand. Now, software development can be agile, too (whatever that means).
Continue reading Words don’t mean what they don’t mean