In my experience of the past 5 years: yes. Substantially better idea-to-production latency, given a high minimum standard for releaseability.
Little's Law is instructive. There are two ways to increase throughput in a system. One is to reduce latency. The other is to increase in-process inventory. They have very different dynamics.
Most software development like everything else is a combination of inspiration and perspiration. How much time is spent in average day coming up with “ideas” versus just doing the work?
Or putting it in production terms, the number of people coming up with ideas for the iPhone in Cupertino is dwarfed by the number of people building them in China.
That you don’t need pair programming to do much of the grunt work that’s involved in development. Do you really need help making sure you write a for loop correctly?
