Evaluating Pair Programming with Respect to System Complexity and Programmer Expertise

A total of 295 junior, intermediate, and senior professional Java consultants (99 individuals and 98 pairs) from 29 international consultancy companies in Norway, Sweden, and the UK were hired for one day to participate in a controlled experiment on pair programming. The subjects used professional Java tools to perform several change tasks on two alternative Java systems with different degrees of complexity. The results of this experiment do not support the hypotheses that pair programming in general reduces the time required to solve the tasks correctly or increases the proportion of correct solutions. On the other hand, there is a significant 84 percent increase in effort to perform the tasks correctly. However, on the more complex system, the pair programmers had a 48 percent increase in the proportion of correct solutions but no significant differences in the time taken to solve the tasks correctly. For the simpler system, there was a 20 percent decrease in time taken but no significant differences in correctness. However, the moderating effect of system complexity depends on the programmer expertise of the subjects. The observed benefits of pair programming in terms of correctness on the complex system apply mainly to juniors, whereas the reductions in duration to perform the tasks correctly on the simple system apply mainly to intermediates and seniors. It is possible that the benefits of pair programming will exceed the results obtained in this experiment for larger, more complex tasks and if the pair programmers have a chance to work together over a longer period of time     

Improvisation in small software organizations

Improvisation can give valuable insights into the relationship between action and learning in small, software-intensive organizations. As this article describes, a specific challenge involves balancing the refinement of the existing skill base with the experimentation of new ideas to find alternatives that improve on old ideas     

Intraosseous anesthesia in combination with neuroleptanalgesia in surgery of the extremities

Intraosseous anesthesia and associated anesthesia (a combination of intraosseous anesthesia and neuroleptic analgesia) were used in 120 traumatological patients. A comparative assessment of the anesthesia degree and the reaction of the organism to the operative agression was performed. The analysis of the results obtained shows advantages of the associated anesthesia over intraosseous anesthesia "per se". Fractionated infusion of phentanyl should be given in the dose 0,001 mg/kg of the body weight. The above variation of the associated anesthesia is supposed to be a perspective method in mass admission of patients.     

Overcoming Barriers to Self-Management in Software Teams

The basic work unit in innovative software organizations is the team rather than the individual. Such teams consist of "a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable". Work teams have many advantages, such as increased productivity, innovation, and employee satisfaction. However, their implementation doesn't always result in organizational success. It isn't enough to put individuals together and expect that they'll automatically know how to work effectively as a team. Lack of redundancy and conflict between team and individual autonomy are key issues when transforming from traditional command-and-control management to collaborative self-managing teams.     

Photostability of a fluorescent marker under pulsed excited-state depletion through stimulated emission

Saturated stimulated-emission depletion (STED) of a fluorescent marker has been shown to break the diffraction barrier in far-field fluorescence microscopy and to facilitate spatial resolution down to a few tens of nanometers. Here we investigate the photostability of a fluorophore that, in this concept, is repeatedly excited and depleted by synchronized laser pulses. Our study of bacteria labeled with RH-414, a membrane marker, reveals that increasing the duration of the STED pulse from approximately 10 to 160 ps fundamentally improves the photostability of the dye. At the same time the STED efficiency is maintained. The observed photobleaching of RH-414 is due primarily to multiphoton absorption from its ground state. One can counteract photobleaching by employing STED pulses that range from 150 ps to approximately half of the lifetime of the excited state. The results also have implications for multiphoton excitation microscopy.