You work with 4 persons on a project which is behind schedule and over budget. You were brought in 2 weeks ago by your manager as a technical leader, to help with the project completion. The quality level of the code is quite low. The requirement was: “take this legacy system and port it to this new environment, iso-functional”. Explanations about what the system is expected to do are coming under the form of 200 bug reports.

On day 1, you proposed that all debugging, testing and programming be done in pairs. The team agreed and have been enjoying some (modest) results as of today. 

On day 3, the manager privately asked you to stop the pair programming stuff, as the project schedule is already very late. You tried to convince him that PP was good for the team, to no avail.

You and the team observed that pair programming gets you better results than solo programming, and were until today decided to keep doing it most of the time.

Last week You had a second discussion with the manager about the very same subject, without success.

Yesterday, your manager had a 1 to 1 meeting with every one of you. Debriefing with the team members today, you learn that he told them as he told you: “stop pair programming, or else I will get you off the team and retrograde you”. Every team member approves of pair programming, but is unwilling to take risk with his/her position fighting against management.