[rileymat2]

I agree, students and industry workers are not directly comparable. But one of the issues that I would wager is somewhat comparable is the human factors which, in the study above showed large inefficiencies in the first assignments before the "jelling" of the pair.

This makes most one shot studies problematic, it also makes starting to pair problematic if you are experimenting.

I have never worked in a full time pairing place, it was experimental, here there, sometimes. But the initial inefficiencies rung true to me, along with this jelling.

But, I have visited a place that did implement full time all the time pairing. (https://menloinnovations.com/our-way/our-process)

With all the money spent on software development, I am a bit surprised there are not numerous double blind experiments and studies where two different consultancies are assigned the exact same very complex project with staffed professionals using different processes. It would be extremely costly, but could pay the industry back many-fold.

[JackMorgan]

You hit on a key concept that we have no way to even measure productivity. We have no units of measure. What is a feature, they are rarely even comparable in any meaningful way. It's possible to have two projects that start the same but rapidly drift apart.

Not only that but different tools have different depreciation rates. I'd much rather try to restart an abandoned Java or C# project vs an abandoned PHP project, even though the PHP project might have been faster to add features at the start.

Because we have no measurements, we have no science.

[rileymat2]

You can make user metrics/surveys/delivery dates the ultimate adjudicator, in a blind way if you have created complete products. They will diverge significantly!

[kosolam]

In a pair programming setup what the pair does when collaboration isn’t needed but just pure coding? Do they separate and code in parallel or how does it go?