Title :
Investigating the Impact of Personality and Temperament Traits on Pair Programming: A Controlled Experiment Replication
Author :
Sfetsos, Panagiotis ; Adamidis, P. ; Angelis, Lefteris ; Stamelos, Ioannis ; Deligiannis, Ignatios
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Inf., Alexander Technol. Educ. Inst. of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Abstract :
This paper presents the partial results of an extended replicated pair programming experiment, conducted at the Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece during the two semesters of the year 2009-10. The entire study involved 160 second semester students attending a Software Engineering advanced programming course with pair programming and test-driven development as teaching methodology. A series of formal experiments were conducted to investigate, as in the first experiment, the impact of developer personalities and temperaments on pair performance. In this paper we report partial results and we focus on pair performance in terms of communication, time to complete assignments and overall score. The main variables were statistically analyzed in order to test differences between two personality groups: A control group with homogeneous personalities in pairs and an experimental one with heterogeneous personalities. The findings reported here concern only the first winter semester and confirm that pairs consisting of heterogeneous personalities and temperaments performed better than pairs with the same personality and temperament type. However, time to complete assignments was not statistically different between the two groups.
Keywords :
computer science education; educational courses; educational institutions; program testing; software engineering; teaching; Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki; Greece; controlled experiment replication; extended replicated pair programming experiment; formal experiments; homogeneous personalities; personality groups; personality traits; software engineering advanced programming course; statistical analysis; temperament traits; test-driven development; winter semester; Controlled experiment; KTS-test; Pair communication; Pair effectiveness; Pair performance; Pair programming; Personality/temperament type;
Conference_Titel :
Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC), 2012 Eighth International Conference on the
Conference_Location :
Lisbon
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-2345-1
DOI :
10.1109/QUATIC.2012.36