Why don't we do pair marketing? Or pair management? Or pair engineering? Or pair architecture? Or pair truck driving?
Do you see? It's a silly concept. You either have a team, and you work as a team, or you don't. Why put artificial boundaries on it? Shouldn't you be doing what's right for the project at hand?
Sometimes you need to work with other people. Sometimes, IT IS A HASSLE! That's what everybody who pushes this concept won't admit, but it's true. There simply are times when the others DO get in your way.
But you do it to share knowlege? Harumph I say. If your design sucks and you have no documentation, then you're dead in the water. Where's the mention of stuff like that?
Just like everything else, it's a tool, and it can be abused. Use it where it fits, but not everything is a hammer and not every problem is a nail.
I still find pair programming quit hard to do with my m8 pulling me out of the zone every other few minutes.
I'm a big advocate of pair programming but only when people are open to it. It's more important to find and encourage a good team dynamic than to enforce a particular methodology. You managed to introduce two very big changes, TDD and pair programming, without a short-term negative impact on the project. That's really impressive. I'd be very proud of the team for sticking with TDD. Even if the team never revisits pair programming you've already had a huge positive impact on how they develop.
Steve: wow. thanks for the most interesting comment.
I would say in this case your first statement is true. they are both inexperienced (one a little more experienced than the other ,actually, but not by much, and they both have different strength). the nice thing about seeing them pairing was that everything was done and learnt much more quickly. they were both new to .Net as the project began which pairing gave an opportunity to learn together all the new stuff.
definitely cut back on learning curve time.
and no, your last statement about management time saving could not be further from the truth. this TDD project was done without projecting times based on pair programming or even using TDD. it was projected in the classing waterfall model way.