Investigations on pair programming in the academia for assessing and achieving effective learning

Abstract

Agile Software Development is being considered as one of the best software development models, in which the family of development processes, discusses the various ways of creating software in a lighter, faster and more people-centric way. It is a fast growing industrial practice due to the documented benefits of increased software quality, shared programmer expertise, and user satisfaction. Extreme Programming (XP) is one of the Agile Methods. Pair Programming (PP) is one of the best practices of XP. PP is a coding activity, in which two programmers collaborate continuously on the program development in a single computer. Pair programming is practiced in IT industry by software professionals as a style of programming which allows developers to produce superior code in less time, and with very less defects, than code produced by individuals. Reported experiments which obtain quantitative results have typically been performed in an IT industry, and may not reflect actual newlineacademic conditions. Direct or indirect mentoring is the most common training method. This thesis reports on an experimental investigations using pair programming in an academic setup. Its goal is to determine if this pair programming style can be used to increase the technical and programming knowledge of the students, and verify the benefits of pair programming is achieved or not. Anecdotal and qualitative evidence from the software industry indicates that in pair programming two programmers working side-by-side on one computer, collaborating on the same design, algorithm, code, or test, perform substantially better than the two persons working alone. Due to the nature of pair programming, communication should occur continuously.