Abstract
Software maintainability is an important key aspect in software development life cycle. It has a huge impact on the time, effort, and cost. This research investigated the effect of applying pair programming on software maintainability vs individual programming approach. We reviewed many related studies which talked about the two approaches, but few of them focused on maintainability. Therefore, we conducted an experiment in educational environment. The participants were novice students in their second year, who finished object oriented programming course. The participating students were divided into two groups, some worked as individual and the others worked as pairs. In order to get good results, we made the experiment among the students in a competitive way. Enabling those who produced the best code to win a cash prize. Finally, code obtained from both approaches was analyzed by software quality assurance expert, who has finished a master degree in software engineering. The results taken from pair groups showed a statistically significant difference in building software with 50% less errors, 30% less code, and 25% better code. Furthermore, there is a marginal reducing in programming time particularly in small size software compared to individual programming.
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Nawahdah, M., Jaradat, M. (2022). The Effect of Pair Programming on Code Maintainability. In: Wong, LH., Hayashi, Y., Collazos, C.A., Alvarez, C., Zurita, G., Baloian, N. (eds) Collaboration Technologies and Social Computing. CollabTech 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13632. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20218-6_3
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