One area of development where I have sometimes wondered about the value that we can get from pair programming is when we’re spending time doing some major refactoring of our code base.

The reason I felt that pairing on big refactoring tasks might be difficult compared to when working on a story together is that with a story there tends to be a more defined goal and the business have defined that goal whereas with a refactoring task that goal is often less clear and people have much wider ranging differing opinions about the approach that should be taken.

Having spent time pairing on some refactoring work for most of the last week I have changed my mind and I think that pairing on refactoring tasks is actually extremely valuable - certainly equally as valuable as pairing on story work and perhaps more so.

What I noticed in my time pairing on this task is that actually although there is more conflict over the approach that should be taken this actually works out reasonably well in terms of driving an approach that is somewhere between pragmatic and dogmatic.

From my experience, the mentality when you’re the driver in a refactoring session is pretty much to want to fix everything that you come across but having someone else alongside you helps to rein in this desire and focus on making the fixes that add value to the code right now.

I was quite surprised to notice that within just one keyboard switch we had both suggested to the other that making a particular refactoring should probably be added to our 'refactoring list' to have a look at later on rather than looking at it now and potentially getting into a yak shaving situation.

Another thing I noticed was that the navigator was often able to point out things that the other person didn’t see - sometimes making a certain change to the code had a bigger impact than the driver had expected and the navigator was able to spot this quickly and initiate a discussion about what the next step should be before we had gone too far down the wrong path.

Refactoring code effectively and not making mistakes when doing so is one of the more difficult skills to learn as a developer and I think it is very difficult to learn by just working on your own since the approach to effectively refactor code by taking very small steps is not necessarily obvious.

While there are certainly books which explain how to do refactorings on our code a lot of the approaches that I like to use have been taught to me by more experienced people that I’ve had the chance to pair with. Pairing creates the opportunity for these skills to be passed on to other members of the team.