Beyond Legacy Code

Buddy Program

For teams that have serious trepidation about the idea of pairing together, and there are a few, I’ll suggest another practice I use, which I call buddy programming.

Sometimes it is better to work by yourself, but developers still want the benefit of feedback. So in buddy programming you work by yourself, in the typical way, for most of the day. Then maybe the last hour of the day you’ll get together with your buddy and do a code review of what you both did that day. This is less extreme than pair programming but it still has significant benefits.

As with pair programming, I suggest randomly swapping buddies on a daily, or at least weekly basis. Or by task, by iteration…all sorts of different ways. In a sense, buddy programming ...