[johnkchow]

I have to agree that PP loses value when you have many senior level programmers on the team. The biggest value in PP, in my personal experience, is transfer of knowledge and experience. This applies mostly to teams with huge gaps in experience (juniors vs. seniors) or new team members that need to be caught up to speed with the codebase.

If the talent level is the same (and by talent I mean having the innate passion and ability to learn, not having actual knowledge) the knowledge of the collective team members will eventually equalize through the initial PP sessions.

Like the author said, the context of the team and the general strategy of the company (i.e. maintaining a project vs developing new features) are the most important signals when determining the programming tactics (i.e. PP and self-learning) to reach those goals.

P.S. The link at the bottom of the article (http://blog.jayfields.com/2011/08/life-after-pair-programmin...), provides two great team contexts for when pair programming succeeds and when it fails. Definitely take a read on that.