Influence on the use of an IDE tool support in the pair programming: A controlled experiment

Abstract

Agile software development has been widespread adopted. One well-known agile approach is eXtreme Programming (XP) where pair programming (PP) is a relevant practice. Although various aspects of PP have been studied, we have not found, under a traditional model of PP, studies that examine the impact of using an IDE tool support. In an attempt to obtain a better understanding of the impact of using an IDE, we present the results of a controlled experiment that expose the influence on quality, measured as the number of defects injected per hour, of pair and solo programmers with and without the use of an IDE. Our findings suggest that the use of an IDE results in significantly higher defect injection rates (for both pairs and solos) when the programming task is not very complicated. Nevertheless, defect injection rates seem to decrease when pairs work on more complicated programming assignments irrespective of the tool support used. Quality is affected in a similar manner when either pair or solo programming is used.