10 Pair Programming Best Practices Questions & Answers

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a guest post on Philippe’s blog where I answered 10 commonly asked questions on the Pair Programming Best Practices. Below is a snippet of the blog, you can read the full article here.

Pair programming is not just sitting together in front of an IDE. Here are battle tested answers to common questions that will make pairing work for you.

Philippe and I are well known to be advocates for Extreme Programming and its practices (well Philippe more than me, but I will share some of the credits 😀). We were asked lately to participate in a Q&A session to share with our experience and recommendations on applying pair programming within a dev team.

Question I: When to do Pair Programming?

All teams do pair programming in one way or another, even if they don’t like to admit it!

Almost all developers have the tendency to ask a colleague for help when stuck on a complex piece of code or a bug, this is a form of pair programming! If we acknowledge that the four eyes principle can help solve complex problems faster, then why don’t we apply it all the time?

Going back to the question, … (continue reading)