Empirical study on the productivity of the pair programming

Abstract

Many authors complain the lack of empirical studies which assess the benefits and the drawbacks of agile practices. Particularly, pair programming rises an interesting question for managers: does pair programming mean to pay two developers in the place of one? We realized an experiment to compare the productivity of a developer when performing pair programming and when working as solo programmer. We obtained empirical evidence that pair programming decreases the effort of the single programmer. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.