Our customer had a high priority problem. It got assigned to a developer. But when the complaints about the slow progress on the problem came in, it got reassigned to me. So I started trying to gather information about the problem. Tried to call the customer. Did not get a call back.Another developer wanted to help out. Turns out he had some good ideas. So I shelved my research and teamed up with him. He had some theories as to why the software was not working. We did not have any means to verify his theories for sure. But we decided to go with his instinct and ship out a script to fix some data (which should also fix the problem if the theory holds up).
The funny thing about this is that I have heard about pair programming. However it is my understanding that this is a technique used in software development, not software maintenance. What do you know? It seems to apply just as well for maintenance. We shall she how it turns out for this specific problem.
