Collaborative pairs spend approximately 15% more time than do individuals on the same task. This additional time, however, is not statistically significant.
Collaborative pairs achieve a higher quality level for programming products. Pairs had 15% less defects in their code. The higher quality level is statistically significant.
Considering the long-term field support savings of higher quality programming products, collaborative programming is cheaper for an organization than individual programming.
Consistently, 95% of collaborative programmers asserted that they enjoy their work more and are more confident in their work than when they pro-gram alone.
The abstract also mentioned enhanced skills and teamwork as benefits.
It’s easy to play armchair statistician and contribute little, but I want to point out that the empirics cited here are effectively just anecdotes. The paper studies 13 pairs and 13 individuals in three assignments in one class at UUtah. Its estimate of relative time costs is only significant to ~1σ because development time has variance of (if I backsolved correctly) 65%, which...seems about right. Still, it seems like borderline abuse of frequentist statistics to argue that a two-tailed p<0.05 should be required to reject the hypothesis that pairs finish projects in half the wall-clock time of individuals (which is the null the analysis assumes).
That said, the author correctly identifies that quality matters significantly more than speed. The quality metric, however, is “assignment tests passed” in throwaway academic projects, eliding the questions of what quality failures would or wouldn’t be caught by the review / CI workflows that an industrial project would be going through anyway.
So, finger to the wind, this study feels like it suggests that a pair spends 15% more person-hours (once they get used to each other) before turning their schoolwork in, and do 15% more of the work of the assignment than a student working alone. Consistent with the higher reported work-enjoyment numbers! Definitely a stronger showing than I would have guessed! But definitely not well-abstracted by “no significant result for time; significant improvement for quality”.
Found a long dissertation on the topic: https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/dissertation.pdf
From the abstract:
The abstract also mentioned enhanced skills and teamwork as benefits.
It’s easy to play armchair statistician and contribute little, but I want to point out that the empirics cited here are effectively just anecdotes. The paper studies 13 pairs and 13 individuals in three assignments in one class at UUtah. Its estimate of relative time costs is only significant to ~1σ because development time has variance of (if I backsolved correctly) 65%, which...seems about right. Still, it seems like borderline abuse of frequentist statistics to argue that a two-tailed p<0.05 should be required to reject the hypothesis that pairs finish projects in half the wall-clock time of individuals (which is the null the analysis assumes).
That said, the author correctly identifies that quality matters significantly more than speed. The quality metric, however, is “assignment tests passed” in throwaway academic projects, eliding the questions of what quality failures would or wouldn’t be caught by the review / CI workflows that an industrial project would be going through anyway.
So, finger to the wind, this study feels like it suggests that a pair spends 15% more person-hours (once they get used to each other) before turning their schoolwork in, and do 15% more of the work of the assignment than a student working alone. Consistent with the higher reported work-enjoyment numbers! Definitely a stronger showing than I would have guessed! But definitely not well-abstracted by “no significant result for time; significant improvement for quality”.
What am I missing here?