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by Keith Ray.
Original Post: Pair Programming
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Pair programming is NOT two people taking turns programming and reviewing.
Consider what activities are done in programming: reading code; writing code; thinking about code and design; refactoring; writing tests; reading tests; running tests; occasionally stepping and investigating in the debugger; talking to someone about code, design, and bugs; waiting for compile/link to finish; running the app; and checking in and checking out source code to/from a repository. All of those are done by BOTH people who are pair programming.
Part of pair programming's speed increase (approximately twice as fast as one person solo programming) comes from preventing mistakes (rather than identifying mistakes after they've been coded), having more design and test ideas (coming from different viewpoints and experiences), and fast feedback on those ideas.