Title
Improving PSP education by pairing: An empirical study
Abstract
Handling large-sized classes and maintaining students' involvement are two of the major challenges in Personal Software Process (PSP) education in universities. In order to tackle these two challenges, we adapted and incorporated some typical practices of Pair Programming (PP) into the PSP class at summer school in Software Institute of Nanjing University in 2010, and received positive results, such as higher students' involvement and conformity of process discipline, as well as (half) workload reduction in evaluating assignments. However, the experiment did not confirm the improved performance of the paired students as expected. Based on the experience and feedbacks, we improved this approach in our PSP course in 2011. Accordingly, by analyzing the previous experiment results, we redesigned the experiment with a number of improvements, such as lab environment, evaluation methods and student selection, to further investigate the effects of this approach in PSP education, in particular students' performance. We also introduced several new metrics to enable the comparison analysis of the data collected from both paired students and solo students. The new experiment confirms the value of pairing practices in PSP education. The results show that in PSP class, compared to solo students, paired students can achieve better performance in terms of program quality and exam scores.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227018
ICSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
psp class,psp education,program quality,exam scores,large-sized classes handling,pair programming,further education,previous experiment result,pp,students' involvement,students performance,solo students,educational institutions,improved performance,solo student,summer school,new experiment,psp course,better performance,personal software process education,paired students,software institute,software process improvement,computer science education,process discipline conformity,improving psp education,universities,software institute of nanjing university,empirical study,personal software process,groupware,software engineering,collaborative learning,data collection,estimation
Pair programming,Collaborative learning,Personal software process,Systems engineering,Collaborative software,Computer science,Workload,Mathematics education,Further education,Conformity,Multimedia,Empirical research
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
2
0270-5257 E-ISBN : 978-1-4673-1065-9
978-1-4673-1065-9
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.57
15
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guoping Rong1275.14
He Zhang281765.63
Mingjuan Xie371.35
Dong Shao43810.52