Market7

Market7 is diligent about several aggressive engineering practices, one of which is pairwise programming. Our engineers do a stand-up meeting every morning in which they review current priorities as set by the business side of the company. Once it’s determined what’s in store for the day, they couple up and proceed to their workstations to construct Ruby on Rails code with two pairs of eyes on each monitor and two pairs of hands over each keyboard. It might seem that double teaming the construction of each line of code would halve efficiency, but pairing proponents argue the opposite, citing such factors as:

• twice the ideas to address challenges as they arise
• two people buying into approaches for less chance of undisciplined decent that would be later regretted
• accountability to partner resulting in consistent focused productivity (without frivolous Web surfing etc. diversions)
• expanded awareness within organization of every element and its justification, for better maintenance and enhancement over time

These factors have proven themselves for us and I have come around on my initial skepticism about the effectiveness of pairing. I was telling an old friend of mine about this practice, and he pointed out that we pretty much grew up with it. I went to an Orthodox Jewish school until college. Talmud, the books of rabbinic deliberations and debates over Jewish law, is often studied by “havrusa”, which is pretty much Yiddish for “pairing”. Two students hunched over the same book, endeavoring to heighten their combined understandings by blending each other’s perspective.

pairwise programming, programming approach, rails