[ssorallen]

Although wait, what is this?

> In one project my team decided to start pair programming when the time it took to complete a task was in danger of violating our forecast.

They tried to hurry up to stick to the "forecast"? Okay no thanks, not for me.

[dirklectisch]

Author of the article here.

The thinking here was that work that reaches a cycle time that is higher than 85% of the other work we completed is probably worth some extra attention. Is the person working on it stuck? Is the problem so complex that it might be useful to sit down and have a look at it together?

We all felt it was a good motivator to work together on a regular basis. Or at least step up the amount of communication around that unit of work.

[ssorallen]

My intuition would be: our "forecasting" solution is never going to be 100% right. Here's an example where it's completely wrong, scrap the "forecast" and get the work done. Don't sleep in the office overnight, don't throw more developers at it; acknowledge no forecasting system ever will get creative work predictions/forecasting correct.