Focus assign multiple engineers to the same task - Dawid Ciężarkiewicz

This resource first appeared in issue #86 on 06 Aug 2021 and has tags Strategy: Project Management, Technical Leadership: Other

Focus: assign multiple engineers to the same task - Dawid Ciężarkiewicz

We’ve talked here quite a bit - starting way back in #13 - about pull requests as asynchronous pair programming, and the benefits of pair programming - not merely for quality control but for knowledge sharing in both directions.

In this thought-provoking article, Ciężarkiewicz argues in favour of routinely having two (or more!) team members assigned to a task, so that rather than a code review at the back - or even before pair programming at a shared IDE would start - two people are bouncing the problem and possible solutions back and forth. The argument is that this leads to:

• faster technical growth of team members,
• better team cohesion as people work and interact more closely together against the same problem,
• better knowledge sharing,
• higher quality of the code and design,
• less burn-out as people can focus more on one thing with less distraction,
• the work actually assigned getting done faster.

My take on research software development is that one of its defining characteristics is subtlety, rather than (in many other areas of software development) complexity - and thus having more input more often is important; so I tend to find Ciężarkiewicz’s argument pretty compelling.

What do you think? Have you seen research software teams routinely assigning pairs of team members to tasks? How did it go - what were the advantages and drawbacks?