Pair designing as practice for enforcing and diffusing design knowledge

Evolving software's design requires that the members of the team acquire a deep and complete knowledge of the domain, the architectural components, and their integration. Such information is scarcely addressed within the design documentation and it is not trivial to derive it. A strategy for enforcing the consciousness of such hidden aspects of software's design is needed. One of the expected benefits of pair programming is fostering (tacit) knowledge building between the components of the pair and fastening its diffusion within the project's team. We have applied the paradigm of pair programming to the design phase and we have named it 'pair designing'. We have realized an experiment and a replica in order to understand if pair designing can be used as an effective means for diffusing and enforcing the design knowledge while evolving the system's design. The results suggest that pair designing could be a suitable means to disseminate and enforce design knowledge. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.