Analyzing the Cost and Benefit of Pair Programming Revisited

Abstract

Pair programming has received a lot of attention from both industry and academia, but most paper focus on its technical aspects, while its business value has received much less attention.  In this paper, we focus on the business aspects of pair programming, by using a number of software development related met rics, such as pair speed advantage, module breakdown structure  of the software and project value discount rate, and augmenting them by taking into account the cost of change after the initial product release and inherent non-linearity of the discount rate curves. The proposed model allows for a more realistic estimation of the final project value, and the results of System Dynamics simulations demonstrate some useful insights for software development management.