In the realm of software development, practices that foster collaboration, creativity, and code excellence are worth their weight in gold. One such practice, paired programming, has emerged as a transformative approach. Paired programming refers to a style of software development where two programmers share a single computer and develop together. It is not widespread in the programming industry, but it has started to catch on and become more common. At Menlo Innovations, we have not only embraced it, but elevated it to touch most aspects of our practice, our culture, and our thinking.

The roots of paired programming at Menlo Innovations trace back to my early career as a programmer, right out of college and then graduate school. In my early jobs, I loved the mental challenge of programming, but I found that I kept falling off cliffs in my projects. The teams I was part of kept missing deadlines and delivering poor quality, and the only ones who could fix the inevitable bugs were the programmers who originally wrote the problem code. This led to long nights for many of us. I became concerned that perhaps I wasn’t cut out for this profession. I decided there was something fundamentally wrong with the way the work was organized and I became determined to find a better way. I started reading books on systems thinking and organizational design.