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Pair Programming vs. Side-by-Side Programming

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 3792))

Abstract

In agile methodologies communication between programmers is very important. Some of them (e.g. XP or Crystal Clear) recommend pair programming. There are two styles of pair programming: XP-like and side-by-side (the latter comes from Crystal Clear). In the paper an experiment is described that aimed at comparison of those two styles. The subjects were 25 students of Computer Science of 4th and 5th year of study. They worked for 6 days at the university (in a controlled environment) programming web-based applications with Java, Eclipse, MySQL, and Tomcat. The results obtained indicate that side-by-side programming is a very interesting alternative to XP-like pair programming mainly due to less effort overhead (in the experiment the effort overhead for side-by-side programming was as small as 20%, while for XP it was about 50%).

This work has been financially supported by the State Committee for Scientific Research as a research grant 4 T11F 001 23 (years 2002-2005).

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Nawrocki, J.R., Jasiński, M., Olek, Ł., Lange, B. (2005). Pair Programming vs. Side-by-Side Programming. In: Richardson, I., Abrahamsson, P., Messnarz, R. (eds) Software Process Improvement. EuroSPI 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3792. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11586012_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11586012_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-30286-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32271-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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