Pair Programming in Graduate Software Engineering Course Projects

Pair programming has been used in undergraduate classes in order to develop student skills and to enhance student learning. Experiments with such an approach have demonstrated positive effects. This paper investigates the effects of pair programming in the graduate software engineering class by conducting a case study with six students who were assigned to work on incremental changes on an open source application either as pairs or as individuals. The results of the case study showed that paired students completed their change request tasks faster and with higher quality than individuals. They also wrote less lines of code and used more meaningful variable names. Pair programming could be an effective and useful approach for graduate software engineering classes.