Steve Freeman

Martin Fowler talks about the benefits of rotating staff through projects.

Early in the life of the Extreme Tuesday Club we used to swap odd programmer days between projects in different companies. It was very effective as a means of trading skills and bringing a new pair of eyes onto a code base.

One of the nice features of just swapping days is that we could do the whole thing “off the books”, without complicated arrangements between organisations, while getting most of the benefit of an official consultant review. It was also a good way to liven things up for developers when their own projects got a bit dull.

Programmer swapping is a good advertisement for the whole Agile approach. We were able to come into a project for a day and contribute immediately. Granted, we all shared a culture, but on most teams you’d have to start with a week of reading before you could talk to anyone.

Later on, I was at an early XP workshop at OOPLSA where the group was thinking about ways to improve the practice of XP. After some brainstorming, the top technique they picked was cross-project visits.

Time to pick this one up again, I think.