Pair Programming for Software Engineering Education: An Empirical Study

As an iterative and incremental methodology, agile software has helped a lot in evolving solutions from selforganizing, cross-functional teams. Pair programming is a type of agile software development technique where two programmers work together with one computer for developing the required software. This paper reports the results of a pair programming exercise carried out with a set of one hundred and twelve post graduate students, who developed small applications as a part of their software development laboratory course at Kumaraguru College of Technology (KCT) during the academic year 2012-2013 and 2013-2014. The objective of this research is to investigate the effect of adopting pair programming as a pedagogical tool in Indian higher educational setting. Purposeful pair programming modules were deployed in various phases of software development and the results revealed that pair programming is not only an useful approach in teaching computer programming but also facilitate effective knowledge sharing among students. Further, the effectiveness of pair programming was realized to a greater extent during the designing and coding phases of software development. Practicing pair programming also enables the students to develop their collaborative skills, which is crucial to an industrial working environment