Pairing with rotation results in a situation where everyone on the team is familiar with all the parts of the system. Apart from the bus problem, which is rathe

Pairing with rotation results in a situation where everyone on the team is familiar with all the parts of the system. Apart from the bus problem, which is rather low-risk, it means that you don't have to wait for the expert in subsystem X to have finished what he's doing and move to the new task; everyone's a subsystem X expert. I don't think it's always worth pairing. Easy work that doesn't need expertise is best done solo. I acknowledge the "velocity" accusation; I've never seen a pair work faster than two skilled solo developers. But the quality of the output from a pair is generally a lot higher than that from a solo coder. It really does help to have someone looking over your shoulder. I've not seen a comparison of solo and pair velocity that takes into account code quality, and debugging and bug-fixing effort.