About Pair Stairs

Pair Stairs visually represents who has paired with whom and how often, so called because the top half is not used and so looks like a set of stairs.

Pair Stairs are most often associated with Paired Programing, an Agile Software Development technique, but can be used for any activity that involves pairing.

One of the possible reasons to use Pair Stairs during software development is to ensure that every developer pairs with every other developer.

Pairing helps with knowledge sharing throughout the development team and the staircase will help visualize gaps in the knowledge sharing chain.

Using Pair Stairs

Once you have added your people to the "Pool" with the "Add Person" button (initials work well here), then you can begin pairing them.

You can either drag and drop each person from the pool into a pair, or use the "Allocate" button to automatically assign pairs that have spent the least time together.

When you are happy with the set of pairs for this time period then "Save Pairs" will record who has paired together.

You can move people from the pool to "Away" if you don't want to them to be included.

A common usage would be: each day remove the left hand pair and re-allocate. This ensures that one person stays with the task while being given a new person to pair with.

An un-even number of people will result in someone not pairing, this is also recorded to ensure this does not keep happening to the same person.