WhyPairProgram

Because it's fun, it stops you from goofing off (e.g. not writing tests, surfing the web all friday afternoon), helps you to confirm that the design you're working on is correct (two heads being better than one), it keeps your defect rate down, and best of all it shares the knowledge about the systems' classes much more equally among the team. -- TimBacon

This last point is known as increasing the truck number, the truck number being the number of people who would need to be run down by a truck before the project would be doomed. On most projects this number is one. On an XP project this number is usually the number of programmers minus one - quite a difference!

-- Wholly agree, with one exception - surely this should read "number of XP programmers minus two" - if the rest of the team were hit by the truck, bus or tram then I would know enough about the project but would not be able to write any production quality code without a partner -- PaulS

For some great metrics on the power of pair programming, visit http://www.pairprogramming.com³host³³date³April 15, 2002³agent³Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-GB; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011128 Netscape6/6.2.1³WhyPairProgram