{"id":719,"date":"2009-04-10T22:16:54","date_gmt":"2009-04-11T03:16:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/?p=719"},"modified":"2009-04-10T21:17:04","modified_gmt":"2009-04-11T02:17:04","slug":"forced-pair-programming-considered-unproductive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2009\/04\/10\/forced-pair-programming-considered-unproductive\/","title":{"rendered":"Forced Pair Programming considered unproductive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just read a blog post by <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.blainbuxton.net\">Blaine Buxton<\/a> describing the phenomenon of  <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.blainebuxton.net\/2008\/10\/forced-pairing.html\">Forced Pairing<\/a>.  In a nutshell, pair programming has to take into consideration the human factor when programming.  Some people need their own space to code well.<\/p>\n<p>On reflection, this makes sense.   When I have pair programmed, I have usually been supportive of the idea and want to share my thoughts and ideas with the person that I pair with.  However, communication of thoughts and motives is at best an imprecise art.   From what I have seen, pair programming can have issues at the ground level under the following circumstances:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If one person in a pair is not willing to communicate with the other person<\/li>\n<li>If one person cannot express intentions well to the other person<\/li>\n<li>One person is moving too quickly and will not slow down enough for the other person to keep up (This is not fun at all)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I cannot imagine an environment where pair programming was taken so seriously that is has been codified as a <em>law<\/em> but if they do exist then Forced Pair Programming is definitely something to watch out for.  However, I do believe that pair programming is an effective strategy for getting multiple developers up to speed on any codebase and avoids the Only One Developer Understands this Code syndrome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just read a blog post by Blaine Buxton describing the phenomenon of Forced Pairing. In a nutshell, pair programming has to take into consideration the human factor when programming. Some people need their own space to code well. On reflection, this makes sense. When I have pair programmed, I have usually been supportive of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":703,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[972],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}