Pairing Programming In Loud Environments

At our Ruby on Rails development shop, Integrum we engage in an XP practice called pair programming. Over the last six months we have seen more interest from the community on some of our agile practices. At recent Gangplank Hacknight several of our programmers were engaging in pair programming while the equivalent of tornado was going through the building. The hacknight had a full on demonstration of grinding your own espresso beans and nearly a 100 people in the room. As you can hear the enivorment was insanely loud. However, as you can see the pairs seem to be able to totally isolate themselves from their surrounding and have meaningful and active conversation to solve problems. While I don’t advocate loud environments, I think this is a testament to the power of engage and focused pairs.

Hack Night Pairing from Integrum Technologies on Vimeo.