Ten Reasons Why You Should Be Pair Programming.

If your team is not pair coding most of the of the time, then I think you are doing it wrong.

About this time last year (in the ‘beforetimes’) I took a contract that required that I would pair-program all of the time, eight hours a day, five days a week. I went into the role with a healthy dollop of scepticism, but a year on I am fully drinking the Kool-Aid. So much so that I have been inspired to pen this blog post exalting the benefits of the full-time pair programming!

Here are my favourite things about this working style. Not just my favourites really, this is why you should be doing this. If you are working on a solo team (particularly remote) suggest pair coding to your management. If you are running a team (particularly a remote team) have a think about implementing a full-time pair coding philosophy.

Here we go!

This is the most important one, which is why it is first in my list… What is the ‘bus factor’ of the team that you currently work in? I would bet that you could think of one person on your team, who, if they went under a bus (very sadly) then the project would really suffer. Hence, the ‘bus factor’ of your project is ‘one’, and the company you work for should treat this as an absolute emergency. But I bet they don’t.

Having crucial knowledge about how some part of a solution stuck in one person’s brain should really be a disaster for any team. In actuality it is incredibly common, I would argue that it is the norm.

With a pair programming set up, the bus factor of the team quickly increases to be equal to the number of people in the team. There are no knowledge silos. From a project point of view, the continual context switching is such an incredible boost, but it is often chronically undervalued.

If your project success is resting on one person then you have a serious problem. This problem goes away if you start pairing.

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