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

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.

Ignatios DeligiannisEmail:

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Panagiotis Sfetsos   is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics at the Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Uppsala, Sweden (1981), and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2007). His Ph.D. Thesis was on “Experimentation in Object Oriented Technology and Agile Methods”. His research interests include empirical software evaluation, measurement, testing, quality, agile methods and especially extreme programming. Ioannis G. Stamelos   is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Dept. of Informatics. He received a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic School of Thessaloniki (1983) and the Ph. D. degree in Computer Science from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1988). He teaches object-oriented programming, software engineering, software project management and enterprise information systems at the graduate and postgraduate level. His research interests include empirical software evaluation and management, software education and open source software engineering. He is author of 90 scientific papers and member of the IEEE Computer Society. Lefteris Angelis   received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (A.U.Th.). He works currently as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics of A.U.Th. His research interests involve statistical methods with applications in software engineering and information systems, computational methods in mathematics and statistics, planning of experiments and simulation techniques. Ignatios Deligiannis   is an Associate Professor at Alexander Technological Education Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece. His main interests are Object-Oriented software methods, and in particular design assessment and measurement. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from Lund University, Sweden, in 1979, and then worked for several years in software development at Siemens Telecommunications industry. He was member of ESERG (Empirical Software Engineering Research Group at Bournemouth University, UK). Currently, he is a research partner of Software Engineering Group::Plase laboratory, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.