The motivation behind this post was, I saw few developers who do full time or part time pairing with their peers and driving the process, choose to be mute for the whole time. Of course, this is an anti-pattern.
If you choose to be mute rockstar coder then it wouldn’t help anyone neither you nor your team.
If you see food shows on TV, you’ll observe that there will be two people working together (I used the word working TOGETHER).
You know there will be one chef who knows how to prepare the dish and other chef doesn’t know about it.
They talk with each other about the recipe, ingredients, do’s and don’t, what, how and why and so on so that the other chef gets the knowledge. Next time, the other chef could easily prepare the dish. During this process, the first chef would know few tips from another one.
You see the secret of their success is they talk with each other about the problem at hand.
The same thing is applicable to developers who work in a pair for full time or part-time.
As a developer, our peer may be facing some problem and when he/she comes to you, you should do the same thing as these chefs choose to do, just don’t be mute, talk, work together!
You should talk about the problem at hand, why, what, how and so on. There is a possibility that as a driver of the process, you would learn something new from another developer.
Even one of four values of agile and software craftsmanship emphasize on individuals and interactions. Please see below.
From agile manifesto
From manifesto for software craftsmanship,
https://blog.beingcraftsman.com/datta/
