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

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.