An Empirical Study on Pair Performance and Perception in Distributed Pair Programming

Abstract

This paper reports students’ perceptions and experiences attending an object-oriented programming course in which they developed software using the Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) technique. Pair programming (PP) is typically performed on one computer, involving two programmers working collaboratively on the same code or algorithm. DPP on the other hand is performed remotely allowing programmers to collaborate from separate locations. PP started in the software industry as a powerful way to train programmers and to improve software quality. Research has shown that PP (and DPP) is also a successful approach to teach programming in academic programming courses. The main focus of PP and DPP research was PP’s effectiveness with respect to student performance and code quality, the investigation of best team formation strategies and studies of students’ attitudes. There are still limited studies concerning relationships between performance, attitudes and other critical factors. We have selected some of the most common factors which can be found in the literature: academic performance, programming experience, student confidence, “feel-good” factor, partner compatibility and implementation time. The main goal of this study was to investigate correlations between these attributes, while DPP was used as the main programming technique.