 Move people around to avoid
serious knowledge loss and coding bottle necks. If only one person on your team can work in a given area and that
person leaves or you just have numerous things waiting to be done in that section you will find your project's
progress reduced to a crawl.
Cross training is often
an important consideration in companies trying to avoid islands of knowledge, which are so susceptible to lose.
Moving people around the code base in combination with pair programming does your cross training for you. Instead
of one person who knows everything about a given section of code, everyone on the team knows much of the code in
each section.
A team is much more flexible
if everyone knows enough about every part of the system to work on it. Instead of having a few people overloaded
with work while other team members have little to do, the whole team can be productive. Any number of developers
can be assigned to the hottest part of the system. Flexible load balancing of this type is a manager's dream come
true. |
Simply encourage everyone
to try working on a new section of the system at least part of each iteration. Pair programming
makes it possible without losing productivity and ensures continuity of thought. One person from a pair can be
swapped out while the other continues with a new partner if desired. 
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