Motivation: Have Happier Employees

Turnover is very costly in both recruiting and training costs. Happier, less frustrated people are more positive about their job and are more eager to help the team meet its objectives.

More than half of programmers resist the transition to pair programming. However, once they try, almost all eventually favor the technique. The incorporation of pair programming has been shown to improve the engineers' job satisfaction and overall confidence while attaining the quality and cycle time results discussed earlier. Pair programmers were surveyed six times on whether they enjoyed their job more when pair programming. First, an anonymous survey of professional pair programmers was conducted on the Internet. Both the summer and fall classes at the University of Utah were surveyed three times. Consistently, over 90% agreed that they enjoyed their job more when pair programming. The groups were also surveyed on whether working collaboratively made them feel more confident about their work. These results are even more positive, with 96% indicating that pair programming made them more confident.

Says Chuck Allison [Williams+2000]:

You know what I like about pair programming? First, it's something that has shown to help produce quality products. But, it's also something that you can easily add to your process that people actually want to do. It's a conceptually small thing to add… . And, when times get tough, you wouldn't likely forget to do pair programming or decide to drop it "just to get done." I just think the idea of working together is a winner.