Various companies have tried to come up with a work-around for this risk, and one of them includes the possibility of having a pair of coders at a single keyboard at all times. This strategy boils down to the fact that two minds are better than one, and if one person comes up with a flawed idea, or if one makes a mistake, the other could always try and discuss a way around it. A couple of companies that have tried this approach include Pivotal Labs based in San Francisco, as well as the Xtreme Labs at Toronto. The approach has also been advocated at Thought Works India, and by Naresh Jain, Director of Asia Operations and Agile Coach at Industrial Logic (a site that offers coaching in extreme programming).

Now although programmers working in pairs were found to be 15 percent slower than individual coders working on a project, the code they produced was found to have 15 percent lesser bugs, according to a report from The Economist, a new publication.

But unfortunately the problem is not solved there.