has concluded contradictory results,
indicating that pairs spend almost twice as much total
programmer effort as solo programmers. Examining
their study, pairs did take twice as much time in the first
program which took the students between 2.5-4 hours to
complete. These findings are consistent with earlier
studies [10, 19] indicating that pairing is significantly
more expensive when programmers are first learning
the dynamics of pairing. By the end of the fourth
program in their study, students had about 13 hours of
pairing experience. In the fourth program, the pairs
were beginning to look more affordable. Our
observations, as well as anecdotal evidence, suggest that
it takes programmers a few hours to a few days to
transition from solo to collaborative programming [16].
Based on these observations, the Nawrocki study would
likely have been more consistent with earlier studies had
it been done for a longer period of time.