Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Introducing Programmers To Pair Programming: A Controlled Experiment, A. S. M. Sajeev, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pair programming is a key characteristic of the Extreme Programming (XP) method. Through a controlled experiment we investigate pair programming behaviour of programmers without prior experience in XP. The factors investigated are: (a) characteristics of pair programming that are less favored (b) perceptions of team effectiveness and how they relate to product quality, and (c) whether it is better to train a pair by giving routine tasks first or by giving complex tasks first. Our results show that: (a) the least liked aspects of pair programming were having to share the screen, keyboard and mouse, and having to switch between …