Shane Warden Q3

Q3 - What has been your most satisfying Agile experience?

I think this story's in the book, near the end.  A good friend of mine has been skeptical about agile development and testing and pair programming for many years.  She's actually a great reviewer of drafts and manuscripts because she's honest and analytical and asks good questions.

We sat down a couple of years ago to try pair programming for the first time. She had said "I don't think I'm ever going to understand this deeply unless I do this with someone who already knows how."  We spent a couple of hours ping-ponging back and forth, where I'd write a couple of lines of a test case and she'd write a couple of lines of code to make the test pass, then talk
about any refactorings, and then she'd write a test and I'd write some code. She didn't care for that at all.  She kept saying that it felt like we weren't making any progress, like we were taking baby steps and doing screechingly obvious things.

I won't say that that project was much of a success; we managed to get in about 90 minutes of pairing and could have gone another hour or two to start seeing really great results, but when she went back to work the next week, a handful of other people suddenly asked her to show them how pairing worked, and she had some experience to draw on.

Maybe you want a more successful experience.  I have to say that every time someone asks me to write some code and hands me a failing test, I feel plenty proud.