Productivity and Pair Programming

I'm with Raganwald on the productivity issue. I don't feel like I can measure my own productivity or that of other developers, and I don't think anyone's made a really conclusive argument either direction about the productivity of pair programming, although I will say that there are times when I've found it very useful and times when I've found it a little irritating.

And, frankly, I think a good chunk of productivity studies are bunk anyway. The idea that we can measure and suggest that we're 36% more productive than people X years ago seems to be making claims about precision that aren't supported by any kind of useful data.

But what I will say is that despite the lack of a good productivity measure, I suspect that both a single developer and a developer-pair are more productive than any group of developers who are arguing about productivity instead of writing code.

On that note, I think I'll go write some code.