I work at a small development company as the lead developer. We have two other developers, as well as my boss who is a developer, but doesn't really do much of the actual coding anymore.
The problem I am trying to overcome is multifaceted. We have a tendency all to work on our own projects without much collaboration between us. As a matter of fact, I (as the most advanced developer) ask for the others' opinion/help more than they do mine, because I value the input of an outside eye.
I want to increase our collaboration, and have expressed that to them. In large part because I'd like to show them some things about how to become better developers and follow better practices. But given our other developers' personality types, I think they are more comfortable working alone.
I've been reading about pair programming, and I have read (in some forums) that it doesn't work well when you have one developer being more advanced than the others (which I am). And yet, I feel it is imperative that we start to collaborate so that our work is not so disparate.
My question is whether anyone has ever been in a similar situation, and what worked for them?
I realize this is not a one-size-fits-all situation, but I'm willing to give multiple approaches a shot.
We all work in a common area, developers don't have have individual offices / cubicles.
Best Answer
Since it has already been discussed in other answers why pair programming isn't a solution for you, I will discuss what we have currently experimented with, and are satisfied with the results.
In my view what you can do to increase collaboration is to have two people together on each project. Each of them works on a different part of the project, but because these parts have to be integrated the two developers have to collaborate. This also requires that the two programmers discuss the architecture (layering and interfaces) of the project, and then decide to take on different roles.
And, if this approach, limits the number of projects your company can handle at a time, you can assign this collaborating pair two projects simultaneously.
We recently experimented with this approach, having one of them develop models + integration with apis and the other programmer handling views and controllers. We have found following advantages of this setting: