At stand-up this past Monday after the whirlwind of the holidays, our team anchor encouraged us to pair with somebody we hadn’t paired with much recently. While this was good advice I really didn’t have a clear idea in my mind of how often I’d been pairing with specific developers on the team.

On our project we use Bryan Helmkamp’s pair script to change our git author name to a pair of developers joined with “and.” Since both developer names are included on a commit in a consistent way, I was able to get a vague idea of with whom I’d been paired over the past couple of weeks with a quick git log | grep Pignata | less but I couldn’t really see any patterns from this output.

To better keep track I threw together a quick script to quickly parse out these results and show me at a glance what my pairing habits have been over the past 30 days. Now I can check every couple of weeks to see if I’ve inadvertently become part of a sticky pair or if there’s a developer I haven’t been pairing with often enough:

 jp@populuxe:~/Projects/lorem(master)$ ./pair-stats Habitasse Platea
 Pairing stats for Habitasse Platea since 2009-12-06

 Developer              Days   Commits  %
 ---------------        ----   -------  ---
 Tincidunt Nec          8      55       33%
 Congue vel Mauris      5      40       20%
 Sed Facilisis          4      21       16%
 Etiam Blandit          3      16       12%
 Solo                   1      2        1%
 ...

You can find the script on GitHub.

What tricks does your team have to ensure proper circulation of developer pairs?