Thread: RE: [xmlWiki-developers] meeting minutes from 3 Dec - project del iverables

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Of possible use in the summary:

Please note I was really trying hard to find negative things. I had a really
good
experience with Hugo and everybody else I worked with.

Things that made distributed xp hard for me.

I can't gauge my pair. Normally I'd be in the office and talk with someone.
Take them
out for coffee and learn about their experience. Doing this over the phone
won't work.
I don't know the strengths and weaknesses of my teammates and my pair.

It is hard to explain why you're frustrated over the phone. You can't gauge
how your
pair is going to react. Or if they are annoyed or not.

The whole process kind of goes to hell when you get interrupted. I.e.
bathroom.
Laying down a phone just feels different than taking a walk in an office.
You feel
guilty, like someone is constantly waiting for you. And even if you have a
cordless, taking
it into the bathroom definently violates some protocol.

Plus your wife(spouse) thinks you're not really
doing anything 'up there by yourself' and tends to interrupt. This wouldn't
happen if my
wife(spouse) knew someone else was physically in the house. Or out in public
people would
tend not to interrupt when two people are sitting together and obviously
working. But here
you're by yourself and nobody can really see that you are working with
someone else.

The whole desktop sharing thing really bothered me. We constantly interupted
each other.
It would have been much simpler to hand the keyboard back and forth. Then
you would 
know exactly who was driving. It can be very frustrating trying to move the
pointer
while someone else is trying to do the same. Even when you have a lock, its
a pain to
constantly relase the lock. In person you can see the hands before the keys
are hit. You
don't have this with a screen sharing program.

It is really hard to learn something while in the distributed xp process. I
either found myself
wondering why my partner was doing something. And asking made me feel like I
was inhibiting
progress, again the impersonal phone. Or else I was driving with the pair
telling me
what to do. This isn't good either because I can't concentrate on what
exactly why the
pair is telling me to do something.

It is a real pain to set up a call. In an office you can look over and see
that someone is
not busy. But with the phone, you call and maybe your pair is working on
something and can't
work immediately. Then you're supposed to call back. But you still don't
know if they're
ready. Definently the protocol should be that the busy pair has to call
back.

Everything seems more blunt when working through the phone. Just like people
are more terse in
email, they seem more terse while working on the phone, but not as bad as
email. Seems like the bluntness goes:

in person (least blunt)
phone
email
text chat

Text chat does not really work for technical discussion. Technical
discussion needs elaboration not tersness. Nobody wants to type alot. And
the abbreviations are annoying. You never are sure what they mean.

Its an effort to discuss ideas with teammates who are nonpairs. You have to
arrange it. 
You just can't see they are not busy and walk up and start talking. It is
more of an 
effort to communicate with team members in distributed xp.

It seems that there is the drive to make oneself available too much. Because
there is the idea
that all you need is time and access to the internet. But it is probably not
appropriate to think that you can pair program at grandma's house over
Thanksgiving. Even though grandma has a 1Ghz pc and a cable modem. Pair
programming is best done at regular scheduled intervals. I
had the opposite problem. We had people over for thanksgiving and I was
tempted too much to
try to set something up. It just didn't work. We had people over and I was
pre-occupied. Its better to just forget about it.

There is also the temptation to read documentation or something while your
pair is writing code or doing something else. The pair that is hosting the
shared session can't see what you are doing anyhow. This kind of destroys
the whole motiviation for pair programming. So unless there is some kind of
technology to share both desktops or lock the screens together in some type
of bidirectional way, you really don't know if you're pair programming or
not.

Having a phone headset as opposed to using the handset is mandatory for any
distributed XP'r. 
I used a handset and it really made my neck sore. No the speaker phone
doesn't work well either. Don't even try a cellphone without a headset. My
pair had to set the cellphone down when typing. It inhibits the work flow,
you can't talk and type at the same time. And when you are typing you get
the best ideas. But we did the best with what we had and did make alot of
progress. It just wasn't as good as it could have been.

Since you're using a phone you really cannot listen to music as it
interferes with the phone and annoys your pair. This is a big deal for me.
Phone resolution is much lower than cd resolution. So even if your pair
likes the same type of music, it just doesn't work.

Thread: RE: [xmlWiki-developers] meeting minutes from 3 Dec - project del iverables

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