Forced Pairing

Let's be honest. I'm not a big fan of "forced" pairing. I believe in active collaboration between cooperating team members. In other words, two people should pair if they want to. The energy of pairing is incredible when both partners are engaged and having fun. The code is better and so is the resultant design. It's the other side of the coin that I don't like and think the results are worse, even if the two programmers were working separately. A good pairing starts with the pair liking to work with one another. They don't have to see eye to eye, but they must enjoy the journey of working on code together. They will push and encourage each other to do better. A fun competition that will result in another problem being pushed past and the winner being a well-maintained system.

"Forced" pairing is what XP advocates and I see a huge problem with it. The reason is if the pair doesn't like or respect one another, the code quality will be on par with that of the worst of the pair. When pairs don't get along, one side will disengage. When this happens, you get none of the benefits. The team still thinks its safe from doing code reviews because they had four eyes on all code. Not so. To ignore the effects of "forced" pairing is to ignore that the team is human.