Join the Agile Community

With more than 4261 members located around the globe, the Agile Alliance is driven by the values and principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We support those who explore and apply Agile principles and practices to make the software industry productive, humane, and sustainable.

Knowledge Repository

Search for text or agile alliance members

A Field Study of Developer Pairs: Productivity Impacts and Implications

by Allen Parrish, Randy Smith, David Hale, and Joanne Hale (2004-09-01) permalink

Read the full article

The authors build from a previous study of programmer productivity as team size increases, where they had concluded that increased concurrent work on core modules leads to decreased productivity. They reconsider their data for concurrent working pairs in response to positive findings from pair programming. The authors conclude that the role-based coordination protocol associated with agile software methodologies overcomes a significant productivity loss otherwise associated with concurrent software development pairs.

Rating: 4.0 out of 5 (1 rating)
Source: IEEE Software
File Type: PDF
Owner: admin
Categories: Pair Programming, Research
Updated: September 20, 2006

Comments

Comments admin (19 Sep 17:49)

A good article with some pertinent points raised. The data from the field study supports an interpretation which says that concurrent work on a module reduces productivity. The metric used for this data set does not provide definitive results as the type of collaboration for the concurrent work is not available (i.e. developers could have been in different offices, not in communication, etc.), but the authors propose interesting avenues for further investigation based on this finding.