Test Driven Development and Pair Programming
I am on a team where i am trying to convince my teammates to adopt TDD (as i have seen it work in my previous team and the setup is similar). Also, my personal belief is that, at least in the beginning, it really helps if both TDD and Pair Programming are done in conjunction. That way, two inexperienced (in TDD) developers can help each other, discuss what kind of tests to write and make good headway.
My manager, on the other hand, feels that if we introduce two new development practices in the team at once, there is a good chance that both might fail. So, he wants to be a little more conservative and introduce any one.
How do i convince him that both of these are complementary and not orthogonal. Or am i wrong?
Answer
I'm not sure that having more people who don't know what they're doing in TDD is going to help. It'll quickly descend into both of you Googling the subject, or both of you arguing over exactly what TDD is/isn't.
I think you'd be better of getting someone on the team to become the evangelist for a given technique (someone goes and reads up on TDD, someone goes and reads up on pair programming) and have those people then promote and trial those things. Yes, both can happen at the same time, but they don't have to be used throughout the project team. You could have a small group of your team do pair programming and then report back on their experiences.