I’ve had the opportunity to have worked with many different people pair programming wise over the last year or so, and having seen it done in several different ways thought it would be interesting to work through some of my thoughts about this Extreme Programming (XP) originated practice.

First of all it seems to me that pair programming is a technique that is used with a lot more frequency at ThoughtWorks than at any other IT organisation.

Obviously I do not know every IT organisation in the world, but based on discussions at the ALT.NET UK conference I went to last weekend; it certainly came across to me like that. The difficulty in getting clients and/or management to see the value in having two people on one machine was the main factor mentioned as proving problematic.

I have been working for ThoughtWorks for 18 months now and have been pairing for all but 3 of those months. Perhaps contrary to popular opinion, not every project is a 100% pairing one.

I’ve paired with people for 20-30 days at a time, paired with people for 1 day at a time, paired with people who have been pairing for years, paired with people who are pairing for the first time, and all in all it’s been fun.

I now find writing code far more enjoyable when working with someone else, motivated by the opportunity to bounce ideas around and come up with better solutions.

The biggest benefit for me of pairing is that you have to vocalise your ideas to your pair. This massively reduces the chance of going down a dead alley as a ‘wrong’ idea would have to somehow make sense to two people, which is much less likely to happen.

Equally, when done well, you end up thinking a lot more about why you are doing things e.g. why should that method go on this class, should we introduce a new service, why are we testing it in this way, should we be testing it another way etc.

On the flip side there are times when you just want to look up something which interests you but isn’t totally relevant to the current task and that has to be placed on the backburner for the time being. Pairing can also prove very tedious when doing fairly trivial tasks such as changing configuration files; although of course it does help if every knows how to do this so pairing on these tasks does provide some benefit.

I will cover some of my other thoughts in future posts.