Applied Software Project Management

Pair Programming

Pair programming is a technique in which two programmers work simultaneously at a single computer and continuously review each others' work. Although many programmers were introduced to pair programming as a part of Extreme Programming (see Chapter 12), it is a practice that can be valuable in any development environment. Pair programming improves the organization by ensuring that at least two programmers are able to maintain any piece of the software. Pair programming also helps programmers' professional development, because they learn from each other.

Pair programming is like having a continuous code review, without the extra time or effort of holding individual code reviews. It encourages a redundancy among the team members, and everyone is cross-trained on various parts of the code. Junior people can more quickly learn directly from senior people when they are paired together. While it may seem that assigning two people to a single programming task could be inefficient, in fact, productivity often increases. It takes somewhat less time to perform each task, as there are often gaps where one person is "tapped out" and the other can take over. More importantly, the resulting code is of very high quality, so there are far fewer mistakes to go back and fix.

One useful benefit of pair programming is that people tend to write better code when they know that someone else will be reading it. They cut fewer corners, spend more time making the code readable, are more likely ...