Pair Swapping: What are the Pros and Cons?

Question

The general idea that is espoused by most Agile / XP theorists seems to be that pairs should swap regularly. For example each programmer should swap pairs once per day; half the people swap at the start of the day, half the people swap after lunch: due to external factors such as meetings, holidays and the like most people will tend to flip their swap times once or twice per week so that the pair configurations distribute fairly evenly across the team.

One rationale behind frequent swapping is that knowledge is spread amongst the team quickly and evenly, rather than having specific skills and knowledge being concentrated in particular individuals - implying that work can continue smoothly if people are either away or leave the company. Another rationale, which is a sort of corollary to the dogma surrounding pair programming itself, is that each time someone swaps on you are getting a new code review by a fresh pair of eyes, so it can only improve code quality.

Both assertions sound reasonable; from a management point of view it sounds like you get an increase in both stability and quality, and as such frequent swapping is pretty much standard theory in most Agile / XP books that I've looked at.

So, when actually put into practice, what do people actually think about pair swapping from

• A programmer's point of view?
• A manager's point of view?

And

• What should determine when someone swaps off of / onto a pair?