I am always amazed at my fellow developers who claim how pair programming is “better”. Better because it increases code quality, reduces knowledge silos and increases collaboration. This recital sounds all well and good on the surface but the benefits seem to favor business objectives in the short term over the longer-term satisfaction of the employee.

Extreme Programming (XP) and more specifically pair programming (PP) in recent years has attracted significant interest in the technology community. Pair programming is when two programmers work together at one workstation. One programmer writes code while the other, the observer or navigator, reviews each line of code as it is typed in, switching roles frequently. Continue reading →