Investigating the usefulness of pair-programming in a mature agile team

Abstract

Pair-programming (PP) is one of the key practices of Agile Methods and there are various claims regarding its benefits. However, the empirical evidence to sustain these claims is insufficient, often coming from studies with students as participants. Moreover, the results are sometimes contradictory. Nevertheless, there are already mature agile teams that currently use PP, pairing on an "as needed" basis. We investigate the dynamics of the pairing process in a mature Agile team to understand when practitioners consider PP useful and to compare this with the claimed benefits of PP. In this paper we present the results of a 3 months study of PP in an Agile team of 16 developers. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.