An experimental investigation of personality types impact on pair effectiveness in pair programming

  • Authors:

  • Panagiotis Sfetsos;Ioannis Stamelos;Lefteris Angelis;Ignatios Deligiannis

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Informatics, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece 54124;Department of Informatics, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece 54124;Department of Informatics, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece 54124;Department of Information Technology, Alexander Technological Education Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece GR-57400

  • Venue:
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In this paper, pair programming is empirically investigated from the perspective of developer personalities and temperaments and how they affect pair effectiveness. A controlled experiment was conducted to investigate the impact of developer personalities and temperaments on communication, pair performance and pair viability-collaboration. The experiment involved 70 undergraduate students and the objective was to compare pairs of heterogeneous developer personalities and temperaments with pairs of homogeneous personalities and temperaments, in terms of pair effectiveness. Pair effectiveness is expressed in terms of pair performance, measured by communication, velocity, design correctness and passed acceptance tests, and pair collaboration-viability measured by developers' satisfaction, knowledge acquisition and participation. The results have shown that there is important difference between the two groups, indicating better communication, pair performance and pair collaboration-viability for the pairs with heterogeneous personalities and temperaments. In order to provide an objective assessment of the differences between the two groups of pairs, a number of statistical tests and stepwise Discriminant Analysis were used.