--- title: "Is face to face pairing better?" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/is-face-to-face-pairing-better.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/is-face-to-face-pairing-better.html" published: "2009-09-09T11:37:42+00:00" updated: "2009-09-13T22:08:22.065000+00:00" tags: ["Ha", "Pair Programming"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "A look at face to face screen pairing, with Brian Marick's reasons it beats side by side pair programming and Roy Osherove's doubts about the style." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Is face to face pairing better? Two people working on the same machine at the same time? crazy! only, not really. But i'll touch on why pair programming works so great in a different post. This post is about showing a wholly different style of pairing with someone than I'm used to: [Face to face to pairing](http://www.exampler.com/blog/2008/12/10/screen-pairing/) (they call it screen pairing) In the post, Brian gives several reasons why he likes this sort of pairing to "traditional" pairing: > The work is more free-flowing and conversational. It’s easier to note the other person’s body language. It’s easier to stop coding, look up, and talk to each other. I found the switching between people more fluid, with fewer episodes where we were both going for the cursor at the same time. Working on windows, what sort of software would you need to make this kind of pairing work, though? Is it better than "normal" pairing? I can't say until I've tried, but I can see the upsides, indeed. One downside could be that you could easily not pay attention to the other person. I also like to point to pieces of code using my finger rather than the mouse - it feels more natural and phisycal. So I'm not sure yet. How do you pair today? have you tried this? ## Read next - [One-Liners a new team lead should and shouldn't read](https://www.5whys.com/articles/one-liners-a-new-team-lead-should-and-shouldnt-read.html): Roy Osherove's favorite and least favorite lines from Alistair Cockburn's advice to a new team lead, and why being the abstraction layer only goes so far. - [5 ways to grow great developers instead of desperately looking for them](https://www.5whys.com/articles/5-ways-to-grow-great-developers-instead-of-desperately-looki.html): Five ways a software team leader can grow existing developers instead of hunting for super developers, from homework and comfort zones to code reviews. - [The 3 maturity stages of a software team and how scrum fails to identify them](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-3-maturity-stages-of-a-software-team-and-how-scrum-fails.html): The chaotic, mid-life and mature stages of a software team, the leadership each one needs, from dictator to coach, and why Scrum Masters miss them. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/