Comparison of Pair and Solo Programming through software metrics in University Students’ Projects
Abstract
Introduction: Pair Programming is an agile practice that can be used both in software development for business and in the teaching of programming in university courses. Objective: This paper presents a research that was conducted to compare pair programming and solo programming in university courses from the perspective of the metrics of the programs created by freshmen enrolled in the Bachelor Degree in Information Technologies. Method: The participants were divided into two groups: those who applied pair programming and those who programmed individually. Both developed the same program under the same conditions. The following metrics were analyzed in their programs: Number of Statements, Percentage of Comments, Maximum Depth, Average Depth, Maximum Complexity, Number of methods per class, Number of calls per method and Number of sentences per method. The values of the metrics were obtained by the Source Monitor software. Then, Mann-Whitney tests were performed in SPSS. Results: Results showed that students that worked in pairs wrote code with more statements (p=0.038, U=17.00) and a higher level of depth (p=0.032, U=18.00) compared to solo programmers. Conclusions: This paper contributes to the field of software development teaching by providing quantitative empirical evidence on the effectiveness of pair programming. It is concluded that pair programming can be an appropriate educational approach for the beginner’s software development university courses.
Downloads
In order to promote the development and dissemination of research in education in Latin America, the Ibero-American Journal for Educational Research and Development (RIDE) adhered to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which is why it is identified as a Open access publication. This means that any user can read the complete text of the articles, print them, download them, copy them, link them, distribute them and use the contents for other purposes. Creative Cummons licenses allow users to specify the rights to use an open access journal available on the Internet in such a way that users know the rules of publication. Authors who publish in this journal accept the following conditions: Authors they keep the author's rights and give the magazine the right of the first publication, with the work registered with the attribution license of Creative Commons, which allows third parties to use the published material whenever they mention the authorship of the work and the first publication in this The authors can make other independent and additional contractual agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the article published in this journal (eg, include it in an institutional repository or publish it in a book) as long as they clearly indicate that The work was published for the first time in this magazine. Authors are allowed and recommended to publish their work. low on the Internet (for example on institutional or personal pages) before and during the review and publication process, as it can lead to productive exchanges and to a greater and faster dissemination of the published work
