Pairing Guidelines

This post was originally published on this site

Clean Coder

17 January 2021

Everybody pairs from time to time. It is a rare programmer who has not sat down with another programmer to look something over or help find a bug.

Deep problems, that require much heavy thinking, do not often lend themselves to pairing. The interaction between the programmers tends to disrupt the necessary concentration.

On the other hand, it is not uncommon for programmers to get caught in a problem that they think is deep, but for which there is a much simpler solution that another programmer could quickly see. So it is wise to start deep problems with a pair, or even a mob, but then break it up when it becomes clear that the problem is irreducible.

On the other side of the spectrum, there is no good reason to pair on trivial matters. Fleshing out a list of error messages, or loading fifty fields into

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