Understanding the Impact of Pair Programming on Developers Attention: A Case Study on a Large Industrial Experimentation

Pair Programming is one of the most studied and debated development techniques. However, at present, we do not have a clear, objective, and quantitative understanding of the claimed benefits of such development approach. All the available studies focus on the analysis of the effects of Pair Programming (e.g., code quality, development speed, etc.) with different findings and limited replicability of the experiments. This paper adopts a different approach that could be replicated in an easier way: it investigates how Pair Programming affects the way developers write code and interact with their development machine. In particular, the paper focuses on the effects that Pair Programming has on developers' attention and productivity. The study was performed on a professional development team observed for ten months and it finds out that Pair Programming helps developers to eliminate distracting activities and to focus on productive activities.