
Pair Programming Considered Harmful - ptrckbrwn
https://patrickbrown.engineer/essays/pair_programming.html
======
eesmith
An earlier version of this was posted 5 days ago at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15162530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15162530)
. My comment from then still applies. I wrote the following three paragraphs.

This is a lightweight comment which draws from one published paper, a blog,
and a NYT opinion piece. [This new version has 2 more references, but not to
any research.]

Its sense of incredulity is no further advanced than the opposition to pair
programming in the 1990s, when it was one of the practices promoted by XP. It
does not, as I hoped, tie together the decades of research studies on the
topic.

For a much more detailed summary of the topic, much more along the lines of
what I wanted to read here, see the chapter by Laurie Williams on the topic in
"Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It".

~~~
ptrckbrwn
I didn't realize my google doc was shared on hacker news :).

Can you summarize what is said by Laurie Williams?

~~~
eesmith
No. Go to Google Books, look for the book, go to chapter on pair programming,
page 311. You can read a decent amount as a preview.

As this is a topic you are interested in, you can ask your local library for a
copy by InterLibrary Loan, assuming they don't have it already.

Not that I've read then, but a DDG search shows that some of her academic
publications
[https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/pair.html](https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/pair.html)
and she is the co-author of
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1762375.Pair_Programming...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1762375.Pair_Programming_Illuminated)
.

~~~
ptrckbrwn
k

------
to_bpr
What inspired you to write this?

