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The influence of software engineering paradigms on individual and team project results

  • Session 13: Funding, Practica, and Principles
  • Conference paper
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Book cover Software Engineering Education (SEI 1992)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 640))

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Abstract

For years there has been debate over which software development paradigm is best. There are many anecdotal reports extolling the advantages of prototyping over specifying approaches, but few controlled studies have been performed to quantify the differences between them. We report on some observations drawn about individual and team projects conducted in our software engineering practica and we describe a series of controlled experiments comparing spiral-prototyping to specifying in team projects. In the team developments we found that the prototyped products were completed with less effort, had lower complexity metric values, had fewer reported defects, and were rated higher on the customer's subjective evaluation of quality. We also found that management of the spiral-prototyping process is a critical element in project success or failure. Because of the experimental controls employed in our study and the realism of the programming projects performed, we believe that these results are valid equally outside the academic environment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, University of Idaho, 83843, Moscow, ID

    William Junk & Paul Oman

Authors
  1. William Junk
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  2. Paul Oman
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Editor information

Carol Sledge

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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Junk, W., Oman, P. (1992). The influence of software engineering paradigms on individual and team project results. In: Sledge, C. (eds) Software Engineering Education. SEI 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 640. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55963-9_67

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55963-9_67

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55963-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47330-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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