Why Pair Programming Is Good: Because You Are Human

Ok, I am now going to dive into the myriad of benefits that I see in Pair Programming (and that I suspect would benefit many other professions such as teaching).

Reason #1: Because You Are Human
Humans are error prone. It is a fact. No one goes through life without making mistakes. This fact leads to the most obvious benefit of Pair Programming. You are simply less likely to produce a bug or mistake if you have someone keeping an eye on your code as you write it. I actually think that you are far less likely if your pair is doing his or her job.

When you are pair programming and you are not the one who is typing you still have a great deal of responsibility. Part of your responsibility is to relax a little and rejuvenate, but you are also responsible for paying attention and looking for errors in your partner's work. This does not simply mean looking for typos, although that is important as well, it also means that you are thinking through the logic of what you are working on from a different and less focused perspective than your pair.

Since you do not have to worry as much about the specific details of the solution you have the ability to take a step back and look at the solution in the broader context. This can lead to many insights that are simply not possible when you are deep in the nitty-gritty of code.

At the end of the day a good pair programming team will produce far less errors than a single programmer. Errors or bugs slow you down, especially when they are discovered weeks later and you no longer remember what you were doing at the time that you created the bug. So if your pair is able to catch your bugs as they happen then you save yourself a great deal of time when there are fewer bugs a few weeks later.