Why Pair Programming Is Good: Knowledge Transfer

This might be the single greatest benefit of pair programming in my eyes. In all of my experience with software development I have found the lack of knowledge transfer between colleagues to be tremendously lacking. With pair programming knowledge transfer happens on a daily basis. This helps solve some significant problems with the standard development process:

1. No software engineer knows everything about every technology out there.
1. On a typical development team if you know a great deal about a certain subject you will quickly find yourself responsible for dealing with that technology. Of course this means that other engineers will never learn about the technology and if you leave than the team will be lacking some knowledge necessary to make the software work.
2. In a pair programming environment people are working together every day and pairs are constantly learning from eachother, regardless of the experience levels of each person in the pair (I am constantly surprised by how much an experienced engineer can learn from a less experienced engineer).
2. When engineers work alone then their decisions around architecture and business logic are lost to the rest of the team. If an engineer then leaves the team than everyone else is left trying to figure out their decision making process.
   
1. In a pair programming environment at least two people are working on any given problem, ensuring that the logic that went into solving any given problem is fully understood by more than just one developer.
2. This has benefits beyond just alleviating the pain when a developer leaves a team. It can also speed up the development process by preventing any one person from being a bottleneck because they are the only one who understands how to fix a given problem.