Pair Programming Considered Harmful?

"We have trained, hired, and rewarded people to be cowboys. But it?s pit crews that we need," said Atul Gawande -- a surgeon and Harvard professor who writes for The New Yorker in his copious spare time -- in a recent TED talk. He was talking about doctors, but what tech profession might fit that description as well? Yes, that's right. You there, huddled over the IDEs on your MacBook Pros. Step forward, software developers. Coding has always been seen as lone-ranger work; witness the opening scene in The Social Network. Despite managers' dreams of programmers as fungible units, it's nearly universally accepted that a great developer is ten times as productive as a mediocre one, and/or that a small team of the software equivalent of the Special Forces can code rings around an army of hundreds of grunts. The flip side is that one cowboy coder's bad decisions can cripple you; maybe immediately, or maybe next year, when you suddenly discover that your organization has quietly racked up so much technical debt that it has become the software equivalent of Greece. There are various ways to try to mitigate this risk. One of the more extreme calls for all development to be performed by pairs of programmers: two coders at one keyboard, at all times, with almost no exceptions. The idea (to oversimplify a bit) is that a second mind will sanity-check every bad idea and support every good one, so you--counterintuitively--wind up with higher per-programmer productivity. Legendary development shops like San Francisco's Pivotal Labs and Toronto's Xtreme Labs(1) have adopted a 100% pair programming mindset, with considerable success. Great! Problem solved, right? ...Not so fast.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/OstKzrpICVg/

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