I have done quite a bit of XP and Agile. Not as much as I would like to be honest but enough to have a personal opinion about it. At first I just did not get pair coding. My initial introduction was within a self directed team practicing Scrum and Agile. I have come to realise that without self-directed teams, you don’t have scrum. You can scrum without pair coding but without these, you have thrown away two very effective techniques. What is left just turns into inefficient micro management. For some reason, these two techniques get resisted hardest. Yet they are the key and the dynamo behind the success.

My definition of Pair Programming: A technique to increase development throughput by maximising review coverage, reduction in faults leading to increased software quality and less effort in downstream processes such as manual testing and product maintenance. See the full article for my reasoning.