The STARS Alliance has adopted Pair Programming as a best practice and we are delighted to have foremost expert and STARS member Dr. Laurie Williams provide a comprehensive one day seminar on what it is and how to implement it in your own courses.

Pair Programming, where two programmers work collaboratively, is known to lead to a number of explicit benefits including:

• Increased discipline. Pairing partners are more likely to "do the right thing" and are less likely to take long breaks.
• Better code. Pairing partners are less likely to produce a bad design due to their immersion, and tend to come up with higher quality designs.
• Resilient flow. Pairing leads to a different kind of flow than programming alone, but it does lead to flow. Pairing flow happens more quickly: one programmer asks the other, "What were we working on?" Pairing flow is also more resilient to interruptions: one programmer deals with the interruption while the other keeps working.
• Multiple developers contributing to design. If pairs are rotated frequently, several people will be involved in developing a particular feature. This can help create better solutions, particularly when a pair gets stuck on a particularly tricky problem. (Wikipedia.com, Retrieved December 4, 2006 from )
• Introducing Pair Programming! http://starsalliance.org/projects_pair.php