Two controlled experiments concerning the comparison of pair programming to peer review

This paper reports on two controlled experiments comparing pair programming with single developers who are assisted by an additional anonymous peer code review phase. The experiments were conducted in the summer semester 2002 and 2003 at the University of Karlsruhe with 38 computer science students. Instead of comparing pair programming to solo programming this study aims at finding a technique by which a single developer produces similar program quality as programmer pairs do but with moderate cost. The study has one major finding concerning the cost of the two development methods. Single developers are as costly as programmer pairs, if both programmer pairs and single developers with an additional review phase are forced to produce programs of similar level of correctness. In conclusion, programmer pairs and single developers become interchangeable in terms of development cost. As this paper reports on the results of small development tasks the comparison could not take into account long time benefits of either technique. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.