**Parent Topic**: [[Software/README]] ## Specialists Are Single Points of Failure Shafer: **"A team of specialists is a team of single points of failure."** He's seen "engineers who would rather spend hours wrestling with a problem than admit they don't know something or ask the team member who knows that domain for help." A colleague who was "highly productive was essentially a silo unto himself, which made working on his code very difficult for other people." ## Pairing Trades Speed for Quality and Resilience On pair programming: research and Shafer's experience say "the average team will get about as much work done in the same amount of total time, but the quality of the work will be significantly higher." More important than productivity is what **promiscuous pairing** (frequently switching partners) produces: "the osmotic learning about the systems and each other's expertise." Problem-solving improves, work is continuously reviewed, and pairs "make better choices than either would individually" — dissolving the silos. ## The Buddy System for Production Pairing is "also useful in firefighting situations, which is why real firefighters use it. Someone sitting next to you and checking what you are about to do to production systems can save everyone a lot of heartache. The minutes in 'overhead' can save you hours of cleanup and apologies." Cross-training is resilience: it removes the SPOF that [[Expertise Is a Constantly Renewed Resource]] warns about. --- *Source: [[Web Operations]] (Allspaw & Robbins, O'Reilly 2010) — Ch 16 — Agile Infrastructure*