Comment by jimkoen
2 years ago
> I explained all this to the manager and invited him to come by and observe us working from time to time. Whenever he popped by, he would see Tim sitting with someone different, working on “their” thing, and you could be sure that the quality of that thing would be significantly better, and the time to value significantly lower—yes, you can have better and faster and cheaper, it just takes discipline—than when Tim wasn’t pairing with people.
BREAKING NEWS: Pair programming improves software quality, more at 5!
Extensive pair programming can also be massively draining and burnout inducing for certain types of people. I hate it when companies mandate pairing. Some people's brains just don't work effectively in that type of environment.
Mandating it is stupid, it obviously depends on the team, task and person.
But you can't deny that it's an amazing tool to open silos in terms of knowledge. I wish people would be more open to it, because I've never been able to get someone up to speed faster with a tool or codebase, than with pair programming. And vice versa too. If you're the person that knows less about the topic, pair programming with a senior is like a one on one tutoring session with a really skilled instructor. It's worth the time in gold imo.