Abstract:
Most pair programming studies are conducted with student pair programmers. This might be due to the fact that it is easier for the researcher to record students. But often it is desirable to get information about professional pair programmers. Could we extrapolate the results from student studies to the professionals? In this paper I present a comparison of student and professional pair programming sessions in order to reveal differences and similarities. The analysis focuses on the speech contributions and the driver distributions of the pairs. We show that professional pairs are balanced regarding speech distribution within the pairs, whereas some student pairs are very unbalanced. For the driver distributions, no typical pattern could be found for both groups.
PPIG 2008 - 20th Annual Workshop
A comparison between Student and Professional Pair Programmers