Investigating Pair Programming in a Software Engineering Course in an Asian Setting

Despite the growing attention given to agile methods and practices in developed countries, there is an exiguity of empirical studies showing their successful (or unsuccessful) use in the developing world. After reviewing the literature on agile practices in developing countries, especially in Asia, this paper adds to the scant literature by describing an experiment on the use of pair programming by students in an undergraduate software engineering course at a Philippine university. Results show that defect densities of programs written by pair programming teams were significantly lower than those written by teams that followed the traditional approach of individual coding of units followed by unit and integration testing. The results, which tend to support the positive outcomes of similar studies in the U.S. despite cultural differences, underscore the importance of seriously investigating the use of pair programming and other agile practices in academic as well as industrial settings in Asia.