Technology companies have long held that the programmer-hour is the unit of productivity. It therefore seems counterintuitive to put a group of programmers to work on the same task, working on the same code – even the same running program – and to expect a positive outcome. Many Agile teams will attest to the challenges when faced introducing pair programming into their processes and persuading their managers of its value.
However, Agile approaches to development, which target completed functionality and code quality, continue to gain acceptance. Cincom Wolf Pack Programming, with its focus on real-time collaboration, tries to take key Agile concepts even further towards these goals. For the last sixty years, writing code has been a largely solitary task. With Wolf Pack Programming, it becomes a team sport.
Our discoveries so far about the nature of real-time collaborative development have surprised and excited us, and the wolf metaphor has proven itself deeply effective for creating a simple and flexible process. Real-time collaborative development may fundamentally change how we build software by accelerating the process, reducing the risks of failure and improving the quality of the result.
