A few years back I spent a year working in a peer programming environment. If you have not encountered this before it is where two people work on one computer to write code. When doing this there are two distinct roles, the person at the keyboard writes code the other has the responsibility to watch, hold the "big picture" in their head and raise issues when spotted. You swap places at regular intervals when it makes sense.
This sounds like a way to produce less code at first but is actually a very productive way to work as long as both people respect each others skills.
Recently I found this talk on Mob Programming which lifts peer programming to the whole team level, to me this sounds really interesting.
Really interested to hear from people that have done Peer or Mob based work and their feedback of it, for me it was a very positive experience but I can see how it would go wrong :)
Woz
At my current company we do a ton of peer programming, a lot of the developer culture is built around that (there's even special pairing stations set up around our desks to make it easier to do). We don't really have any structure in place like you describe with switching off roles. Instead it's a bit more informal process where we decide to pair when it makes sense, and we talk/discuss the code at hand as needed.
I've found it to be very useful not only as a way of improving the quality/organization of our code, but also very useful as a method of learning. I've learned a bunch of things from other devs at the company this way, and I've also taught a bit too. Personally I think pair programming is a very effective practice, though obviously it can't be the only thing you do :)
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Yep fully agree with all your points. I was in a team of 3, we would split off or pair up and discuss around the whiteboard with all of us.
So right about learning new stuff. You get more insight into how people think when you work that tight
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