Mark Needham

Thoughts on Software Development

Standups: Pair stand together

with 3 comments

One of the common trends I have noticed in the stand ups of teams which practice pair programming is that very often the first person in the pair describes what they have been working on and what they will be doing today and then when it comes to the other person they say ‘ditto’.

After I dittoed one too many times on a project earlier this year it was pointed out to me that this was not a valuable way of contributing to the weekend and that I should describe my view of our progress as it may differ to my pair.

I had thought I was avoiding repetition by not contributing information which had already been covered, but I went along with this idea and immediately something was mentioned which hadn’t been previously covered. Instant vindication!

More recently I noticed a similar trend on another project I was working on and we came up with the idea of each pair standing together in the standup and effectively speaking as one.

This allowed us to avoid the ‘repetition problem’ and the ‘ditto problem’ as when it was the second person’s turn to speak they could just add in any details that their pair didn’t speak about without having to repeat the whole context again.

I think this worked reasonably well and it seemed to make our standups move along more quickly.

Written by Mark Needham

November 17th, 2008 at 10:16 pm

Posted in Agile

Tagged with , ,

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  • http://andypalmer.com Andy

    Another pattern that breaks the ‘ditto’ issue is to replace “What did you do yesterday?” with “What did you learn yesterday?”
    So, for example, Pair Person 1 may say “While implementing the blah blah story, I learnt how to use reflection in Hibernate to make immutable domain objects”, whereas Pair Person 2 may say “And I learned how to catch exceptions in the JUnit 4 style, as well as write a custom Hamcrest matcher.”
    A side benefit of this is that a person in another pair might have run into a situation where they needed a custom matcher, and now they know who to ask.

  • http://jchyip.blogspot.com Jason Yip
  • http://blog.kriskemper.com Kris Kemper

    Good idea. I’ve trended towards standing next to my pair for a while since it just felt right, but I have noticed that many other people don’t do that. I never thought about suggesting a solution before, though it had occurred to me that it wasn’t that effective when people “ditto” too far apart.

    I think I’ll suggest this in the future.