Industry-inspired guidelines improve students' pair programming communication

Abstract

Novice pair programmers find communication within their pairs to be one of the greatest difficulties they face when starting to pair program. However, developers cannot pair program without a certain amount of communication. This research describes the development of an analytic coding scheme derived from the observation of the communication of expert pairs working in industry. Communication patterns identified from these expert pairs are being used to help novices learn to be more effective in their pair communication. Copyright 2013 ACM.