Impact of Pairing on Various Software Development Phases

This paper presents a study which synthesizes the various phases of software development and analyze the impact of pairing on each phases of the software development. The main aim of this paper is to find out whether pairing up of developers is required in all the phases of software development, or if there an alternate way to minimize the pair-up times between these developers, in order to maximize the resource utilization and reduce the development cost. The findings reported in this paper are part of a larger study conducted at the Auburn University during spring 2009 and the Alabama State University during summer 2012 and fall 2013 using computer science and software engineering seniors and graduate students. The empirical evidences show that pairing on the design phase and testing phase is beneficial and pairing on the coding phase is not beneficial. The results of this study point that equal quality programs can be produced by pairing up programmers only in the design and testing phases of the software development.