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Someone notes a potential flaw in Pair Programming...

posted Wednesday, 24 September 2003
Erb Cooper: [Pair Programming] makes the fatal error of ignoring Murphy. Two people working together might spot each other's mistakes, but they might also buy into a shared illusion -- the illusion that they are right.

Heh heh...I've been in that situation before. Its like Cringely's observations on Donald Knuth. One can get so confident about the accuracy and brilliance and simplicity of the design that one can completely ignore flaws in the implementation. If one can do it, two can do it rather easily, too.

His blog does go on to support the fallback of tests. Problems like this should be approached with more scientific-like tests. If X happens here, but not in "the original", then some approximation of X should be added as a test to the original. Even if all it shows is that case X is wrong to start with and the original is fine, the original should probably be modified to minimize the garbage-in-garbage-out result.




1. a reader left...
Wednesday, 24 September 2003 10:23 am

This assumes these two folks are the only two people working on it. Other members of the team (other pairs) presumably won't buy into the same shared illusion as the original pair. Or if they do they'll at least demand some justification :-) Additionally, the same pair might not keep their rationalizations up-to-date so when they look at the code two months from now they'll be able to honestly say, "What were we thinking?"

Chris Winters