Agile, peer vs roundtable programming

Question

I am a scrum master of a team and I want to improve learning in between team. We are learning new things every day and I thought that roundtable programming would go a long way. Here is my idea:

• We start working on a product\project something that is new
• We reserve a conference room with a good TV so that we can share our screen.
• Continue to work on individual tasks in the same project
• Every time someone gets a query, they would ask team whether they have come across that
• If yes, the team member would explain why and what to do to get through that obstacle
• If not, we all debug\analyse and find the solution

We would do this an hour a day at most. I did read about peer programming but that's only two people while working on new project everyone should be able to be on same page so I thought of this (cannot be anything new but I don't know).

Does that sound like a good approach? Has anyone tried this? And if yes, what was the result?

Thanks in advance -V.

Answer 1

There's a decent amount of tinkering lately with "mob programming" which is similar (but some teams enforce one "driver" and everyone else assisting, sort of like extreme pairing). Google it. :)

Answer 2

You have a hypothesis, now you need to decide:

• How will you measure success?
• What will be your criteria for stopping the experiment?
• What will you do if one or more team members does not like this approach?

Trying new ways of working is a great idea, but it needs to be done in a way that you get the most benefit.

For example, you could set your measure of success to be a reduction in the time taken to solve problems. Then you could measure how long it takes you team before and after the new approach is tried.

Perhaps you will say that if after 2 weeks no improvement is seen in the time to solve problems then you will stop the experiment.

This time boxing and measurement is important as it helps to keep the team motivated while you try the new approach.

You may also want to try pair programming at some point. Use the same criteria for success and compare the results.