In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in pair programming (PP). However, despite the existing work, there is still a lack of substantial evidence of the effects of PP in industrial environments. To address this issue, we have analyzed the work of a team of 17 industrial developers for 14 months. The team is part of the IT department of a large Italian manufacturing company; it adopts a customized version of extreme programming (XP). We have investigated the effects of PP on software quality in five different scenarios. The results show that PP appears to provide a perceivable but small effect on the reduction of defects in these settings.

In this paper we present a study on how pair programming (PP) facilitates the introduction of new developers (novices) in a team. Data has been collected non-invasively on how people paired in an industrial team of developers for 10 months; during such time novices joined the team. We focused on spontaneous PP, that is, on PP occurring when developers think it is most effective. Social network analysis techniques are used to analyze developers interactions and infer possible conclusions. It appears that initially PP is used to initiate novices, then it is drastically reduced to be resumed eventually when novices ldquofeelrdquo they have reached a significant level of maturity in the team. These phases are coherent with available works on group development and confirm existing findings on the importance of PP in the introduction of novices in teams, and, more generally, on team dynamics.

Computational Thinking (CT) has been recognized as one of the fundamental skills that all graduates should acquire. For this reason, motivational concerns need to be addressed at an early age of a child, and reaching students who do not consider themselves candidates for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines is important as well if the broadest audience possible is to be engaged. This article describes a framework for teaching and assessing CT in the context of K-12 education. The framework is based on Agile software engineering methods, which rely on a set of principles and practices that can be mapped to the activities of CT. The article presents as well the results of an experiment applying this framework in two sixth-grade classes, with 42 participants in total. The results show that Agile software engineering methods are effective at teaching CT in middle schools, after the addition of some tasks to allow students to explore, project, and experience the potential product before using the software tools at hand. Moreover, according to the teachers’ feedback, the students reached all the educational objectives of the topics involved in the multidisciplinary activities. This result can be taken as an indicator that it is possible to use computing as a medium for teaching other subjects, besides computer science.

Developer turnover can result in a major problem when developing software. Senior developers leaving the team cause a loss of knowledge; on the other hand, new developers need some time to become fully productive. In this paper, we propose to use a wordle to visualize quickly the level of cooperation of the team in the project. Each word is the name of a class; the size of the word depends on the total effort spent by the team on the corresponding class, and the color is determined by the percentage of team working on the class. We applied pre-attentive processing techniques in the designing phase, so that the user can find out quickly those classes requiring high effort of a small part of the team. This information allows to take corrective actions, such as re-allocating some resources. Thus, this visualization can help in mitigating the knowledge loss and the slowing down due to turnover. On the base of our wordle, we describe four possible cases of development activities. A sample application of our visualization, in the context of a multi-developer project, shows concretely its potentials. We checked, through simulations, that the interpretation of our wordles remains the same for color blind users.