We use the four eyes polity too, most agile teams do. All code is either pair programmed or reviewed prior to check in. This becomes more challenging when the team is distributed across time zones.

We don’t have a second developer build the changes but rely on the CI serrver to do this. CI has the additional advantage or automating some of the work and making it less prone to human error.

I have a paper (see the publications section) which outlines the potential savings of an automated CI based approach over a completely manual one.

Ade

[...] The "It Works on my Machine" Award – Ade Miller talks about a couple of common situations which relate to ‘it works on my machine’ syndrome. [...]

- in case someone checks “something” in, he firstly has to check if his changes do collide with other changes (manually), or better: has to update his project an recompile it.

- in case (after checkin) a build-tool tells us that something does not work, the person who checked in is named by the tool and he has to resolve the dependencies.

- in case someone checks “something” in, some other programmer has to update the complete project on his computer and recompile it to see it working.

Works pretty fine for us : )

Just my 0,02$, Georgi

[...] The “It Works on my Machine” Award – Ade Miller ‘ Occasional build breaks aren’t bad. They can and do happen ‘ How Continuous Integration helps you spot build breaks faster [...]