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Investigating the Usefulness of Pair-Programming in a Mature Agile Team

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Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming (XP 2008)

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.

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Pekka Abrahamsson Richard Baskerville Kieran Conboy Brian Fitzgerald Lorraine Morgan Xiaofeng Wang

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Coman, I.D., Sillitti, A., Succi, G. (2008). Investigating the Usefulness of Pair-Programming in a Mature Agile Team. In: Abrahamsson, P., Baskerville, R., Conboy, K., Fitzgerald, B., Morgan, L., Wang, X. (eds) Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming. XP 2008. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 9. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68255-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68255-4_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68254-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68255-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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