Facework in a pair-programming session

Improved communication is part of the agile solution to the problems we have in developing software. It has been shown that some development practices restricted feedback within teams because empirical studies suggest that a significant portion of the software maintainer's time is required to understand the functionality of the software to be maintained. Muller and Padberg demonstrated that when developers work together as tightly knit pairs this changes as their productivity and feelgood increase. In this paper we report on observations of developers programming as a pair. We see that the management of face is an important factor in attempts to reciver the meaning of code.