Here is a kind of step-by-step guide to doing pair programming. If your team doesn’t adopt any other principles of XP or lean, this is the one thing that will give the greatest benefit for adoption. This is a good recipe for ROI++.

Attitudes

In my experience, programmers are the least willing of all professionals in the software development industry to be paired up on tasks. For some reason, we developers seem to have attitudes and fears about this mode of work. I have heard attitudes expressed like "I don't want someone to be nitpicking every character I type," "I dont want to share my keyboard." There are also un-spoken fears that I have heard told: "They might find out that I'm not as smart as they think I am," "the other guy might make me look stupid," and "I don't want them to know how I really write code." These attitudes and fears are the number one barrier to doing pair programming.

C4 Requirements Checklist

For people to be able to do pair programming, I suggest the following readiness checklist to determine if someone is ready. Not everyone is at a point where pairing makes sense for them. When creating a team to do pairing, it is important that everyone have an open mind to trying the process. Give the list to the people and let them do it on their own, and decide for themselves. Don't collect their lists, just their yes or no answer.

1. Am I willing to Cooperate – do I really want to do this or is someone just telling me I have to do it? Am I bought-in to the idea or is it being forced on me?
2. Am I willing to Collaborate – can I work together with others in a team environment where we all pitch in together to accomplish a task, or do I need to do things only by myself to be successful?
3. Am I willing to Communicate – can I tell my team mates what I am thinking? Can I get a point across verbally? Can I take a spontaneous thought and talk it through verbally and get someone else to understand me? Am I willing to work toward these goals if I’m not quite there yet?
4. Am I willing to Create – can I be of a mind-set that I am creating something of value regardless of the process, and am I willing to try something new to accomplish this?

Implementing It

If your team is on-board with the C4 checklist, congratulations! You now are able to start off on a wonderful process of building some great software. My suggestion now is to get some resources together. Here’s a starting recommendation.

1. Pair Working Space

1. The team should ideally have a smallish space to do their pair programming work. This should be separate from offices or cubicles. While this is not always possible, I have seen some great creativity used to put the team together in their own space. Sometimes this means just adopting a round meeting table in the middle of a cube farm. Whatever it means for your team, do establish the pair working space. Use the guideline of 6-8 square feet per person, and keep the team size under 10.
1. Desks, chairs
1. One desk for every two people, and one chair per person, with one extra chair is just about perfect. Don’t have the desks more than a few feet apart. Keep the team together in a smallish space. This will greatly aid cross-communication between pairs while development is happening.
2. Machines
1. One development machine per desk. Two team members will be sharing one machine.
3. Monitors, Keyboards, Mice
1. Two of each per desk. Space them two feet apart so that people can have a little personal space. Connect both monitors to the dual-head video card, and clone the display so both have the same image. Use USB keyboards and mice, and place one each in front of each monitor.

Orienting the Team to Pairing

Be sure to orient your team to this kind of thing first. Let them know that they will be expected to work together on one machine sharing control, but that each will have their own keyboard, monitor, and mouse. Remind them that cooperation and verbal communication is essential when working with a partner.

Hours and Etiquette

When working closely with other people in this way, we need to be polite, focused, and productive. There are times for all of us when we just aren’t all three of these, and that’s OK – it’s just human nature. We need to be able to “check out” and go elsewhere if that’s the case for anyone at a given time. [Assuming a standard 8AM-5PM day…] Start pairing at 10am, take lunch at noon, and stop by 3PM. This gives everyone some time to work on other things or take meetings outside of pairing. Adjust times accordingly for your team, but this is a good starting point. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your team can pair for 8 hours a day. A 5 or 6 hour pairing day is a lot, even for an experienced team.

Challenges

At first, there may be personality challenges. Some people are more easily able to communicate and share control. Don’t worry if the first few days are a bit rocky, this actually can be a good learning experience (as long as nobody blows up). Keep an eye on tempers to make sure that hot situations can be defused before they cause problems. One technique that works well is to switch pairing partners at the middle of the day, or at least every day. This gets people new learning experiences and moves knowledge around the team (another great benefit).

There is one specific challenge that I want to bring up, because on a pairing team it can be a real issue. Everyone should wash their hands. A lot. We shouldn’t have to remind people to wash after visiting the bathroom, but DO it anyway. I encourage and ask people to use hand sanitizer before touching the keyboard at my workstation. Bugs have really gotten nasty out there, if you haven’t noticed. If there is an illness, be sure to make the people stay at home, or a single cold or flu can wipe out all development pretty fast. I recommend spending $2 for a small bottle of hand sanitizer for every workstation and placing it in plain sight.

Benefits

• Team knowledge share
1. Knowledge will naturally migrate through the team, since people working together will share knowledge about a task. Rotating people through tasks is a fantastic way to raise product knowledge and awareness for a low cost.
• Better code
1. Two pair of eyes on a piece of code are always better than one pair. We sometimes call this process “real-time code review.” Mistakes are simply caught far, far sooner. Code mistakes and poor design decisions simply just evaporate as two people think about the code as it’s being written.
• Quicker code
1. Not that it executes faster, but it probably will do that too. A pair can produce a solution to a feature request far faster than a single developer in almost all cases I have seen, and every study I have ever read. It’s not half the time, but it’s probably more like 2/3 (a 33% speed improvement for you percentage folks…)
• Tight-knit team
1. The team will be more integrated, stick together, be more cohesive, and more social together. People on a pairing team will be united for the delivery of a product, and it the experience will form bonds between team members.
• High-performance team
1. Pair programming teams will almost always outperform teams that don’t use this technique. The more experience teams get to have with pairing will yield even higher performance results.
• Higher morale
1. Teams that use pair programming are almost always happier, and more positive about their working experience.

Summary

When we find the people who have an open mind, and are committed to success as a team, we have a great asset to leverage to write good software. Using the technique of pair programming in a shared workspace, we have many benefits for all - the company, the team, and most importantly, the customer. It takes a little work to get to a high-performance team, but it really isn’t much, and in my opinion, easier than finding a way to coax performance from a non-paired team.

If you have any input or feedback on this article, I welcome it – please post a comment below.