[city41]

I like a lot of what XP brought to the table, except pair programming. I find it's genuinely not effective most of the time. It is very effective when teaching someone. But in general I have found it to be slower, produce worse code, reduce accountability, and causes frustration. I'm currently working on a long blog post detailing my thoughts on it.

[dack]

I'm interested in seeing your blog post - subscribed in anticipation! I definitely agree with the slower bit, but my experience has showed that paired-on code is generally higher quality as the engineers discuss what really should be done and the semantics of what's being built.

There are definitely tasks in which I would avoid pairing - specifically those that are either very ill-defined (like a spike or bug hunt) or too easy (write some data transformations). However, the tasks that should result in a clean, well tested API with edge cases taken care of, tend to be higher quality while pairing in my experience.