Pair Programming and Software Defects--A Large, Industrial Case Study

Author

di Bella, E. ; Fronza, Ilenia ; Phaphoom, Nattakarn ; Sillitti, Alberto ; Succi, Giancarlo ; Vlasenko, J.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Econ. & Quantitative Methods, Univ. of Genova, Genoa, Italy

Volume

39

Issue

7

fYear

2013

fDate

Jul-13

Firstpage

930

Lastpage

953

Abstract

In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in pair programming (PP). However, despite the existing work, there is still a lack of substantial evidence of the effects of PP in industrial environments. To address this issue, we have analyzed the work of a team of 17 industrial developers for 14 months. The team is part of the IT department of a large Italian manufacturing company; it adopts a customized version of extreme programming (XP). We have investigated the effects of PP on software quality in five different scenarios. The results show that PP appears to provide a perceivable but small effect on the reduction of defects in these settings.

Keywords

configuration management; manufacturing industries; production engineering computing; software fault tolerance; software prototyping; software quality; team working; IT department; customized version; extreme programming; industrial case study; large Italian manufacturing company; pair programming; software defects; software quality; Programming; Software; Pair programming; case study; software defects;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TSE.2012.68

Filename

6331491