---
title: "When people don't want to do pair programming"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/6/4/when-people-dont-want-to-do-pair-programming.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/6/4/when-people-dont-want-to-do-pair-programming.html"
published: "2004-06-04T09:30:00"
updated: "2004-06-04T09:30:00"
tags: ["Agile Related"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "At one of the projects I had a chance to manage, I had to teach an entire teams (3 people) how to do pair programming. I didn't call it “Pair programming” though, as that would have brought on the FUDs, but I just made…"
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/"
---

# When people don't want to do pair programming

By Roy Osherove June 4, 2004 In [Agile Related](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile-related)

**Historical article** · Originally published June 4, 2004; technical details may be outdated.

At one of the projects I had a chance to manage, I had to teach an entire teams (3 people) how to do pair programming. I didn't call it “Pair programming” though, as that would have brought on the FUDs, but I just made people work with each other, test-driven development style.

People seemed to be fond with the idea and have acknowledged their belief the TDD has indeed helped them a lot, but after a  while they stopped doing pair programming. When asked why arn't they working on something together they responded that “it just seems unnecessary”.

How do you respond to that? do you just let them go on without pairing? This was not a project under my control in the sense of staff, and I don't believe in forcing people to pair, because that leads to unproductive behavior. So they went on doing TDD without pairing. The code was still much better, but they definitely took more time to do it.

My point? there isn't one, really. Just wanted to share that sometimes not everything is a rose garden. be prepared.

Have you met such a situation? how did you deal with it?

## More in Agile Related

[All posts in Agile Related](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile-related)

- Jun 17, 2004

    ### [The Israeli Agile development workshop - New site](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/6/17/the-israeli-agile-development-workshop-new-site.html)

- Jun 7, 2004

    ### [Test Driven Development webcast](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/6/7/test-driven-development-webcast.html)

- May 19, 2004

    ### [TDD workshop was great!](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/5/19/tdd-workshop-was-great.html)

- May 17, 2004

    ### [Announcing: Israel Agile Development mailing list](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/5/17/announcing-israel-agile-development-mailing-list.html)


---

## 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).

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### 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/