The Effects of Pair Programming on Learning Efficiency in Short Programming Assignments

Pair programming is one of the important practices of a lightweight development methodology namely eXtreme Programming (XP). It emphasizes the practice of two persons working together at a single computer terminal, to design, code and test computer programs. The effects of pair programming on software development in industrial organizations were studied and it was found that pair programming increases the productivity by 15%. This evidence created an interest in amongst community of computer science educators to apply pair programming in educational settings. We have conducted an experiment with the students of computer science courses to compare the learning efficiency of students when they adopt pair programming with that of students using traditional method to do laboratory exercises of short duration. The learning efficiency was measured by evaluating design documents, completion time, and marks obtained in a written test that was conducted after every exercise. Our research confirms that the adoption of pair programming improves the design ability, reduces time taken to do a laboratory exercise and increases the knowledge and programming skill.