I enjoyed pair programming a lot for the two years I was on a project that did that. We paired every day all day, and I felt that it really drove a team dynamic where people understood the code, and the problems we were solving, and were comfortable and knowledgeable enough to have deeper discussions about technical and architectural direction.

There are some things I really miss, too. We didn’t do code reviews, because two people always had eyes on the code. We rarely ever had bugs in the code that were due to programmer error. I liked that when we came up against a tough problem there was immediately someone to bounce ideas off of, or give input if we were heading in the wrong direction. It felt very much like a team versus what I’ve experienced in my last 8 years of solo programming.

On teams where we are working alone there’s usually a lot of individual ownership over certain parts of the code. The team never feels really in tune with what everyone else is working on and what direction we are moving in. Usually a minority of the team are the vocal decision makers, and everyone else is just pulling tickets and churning out code.

With paired programming it can feel like you’re learning something new every day. You’re either paired with someone more junior, more senior, or at around the same level, and each of those groupings provide for different learning experiences and growth opportunities.

I agree that paired programming is not a silver bullet, and I agree that sometimes I felt like having two people on a task was wasteful, but overall I think it brought our team closer and made us more effective in the grand scheme of things. I miss it quite a bit!