

Practical Pair Programming - blakehaswell
http://blakehaswell.com/post/69781756807/practical-pair-programming

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JoeAltmaier
"Secondly, pair programming is proven to increase code-quality and clarity,
while reducing the number of bugs"

Isn't it true that its only shown to slightly improve these metrics? At 2X the
cost of development, perhaps there's a better way.

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blakehaswell
I’m sure there are better ways. But this is something we’re trying, and in the
early stages it seems to be working well for us. YMMV.

As for the metrics… from the studies that I have seen, the effect pair
programming has on these metrics is related to the complexity of the tasks.

For simple tasks, pairs don’t complete work significantly faster or with
significantly fewer defects (so you’re essentially spending 2x effort for the
same result). But for complex tasks, pairs tend to complete the work slightly
more quickly and with significantly fewer defects (so you’re spending nearly
2x effort for a better result).

Given that our team was taking a long time going back-and-forth in this code
review stage, we decided it would be worth expending the effort up-front to
produce more correct code and (hopefully) reduce the time we were spending
ensuring the code was correct after-the-fact.

I’m not sure that this will increase our teams velocity, but I think it might
increase moral. Nothing sucks harder than finishing a task and then being told
it’s not good enough.

