Practical Pair Programming

if you can’t get a pair or you’re looking to start with a few baby steps, these are some alternatives that are better than nothing. Having someone talk through a problem with you for fifteen minutes before diving into a solo task can be enormously helpful. Sometimes a brief conversation will save you days of building something the wrong way. “Rubber ducking,” or talking something through to understand it better, is another thing we sometimes do in our office. Even if the listener has little knowledge of the problem domain (or happens to be a yellow plastic bath toy), just articulating it can help solve the problem.