Pair of farmers working the rice, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia: Martin Harris

I have done quite a bit of XP and Agile.  One of XP’ engineering practices is pair coding, At first I just did not understand pair coding.  My initial introduction was within a self directed team practicing Scrum and Agile.  I have come to realise that without self-directed teams, you don’t have scrum. You can scrum without pair coding but without these, you have thrown away two very effective techniques.  What is left just turns into inefficient micro management.  For some reason, these two techniques get resisted hardest.  Yet they are the key and the dynamo behind the success.

My definition of Pair Programming: A technique to increase development throughput by maximizing review coverage, reduction in faults leading to increased software quality and less effort in downstream processes such as manual testing and product maintenance.
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