From twin training to pair programming

Abstract

This is an experience report on Twin Training which arose out of a unique situation that occurred in a small research department in Thessaloniki, Greece when all the programmers left the firm. The new programmers in the department were a recent graduate and an intern unfamiliar with the required technologies to complete the unfinished European Union funded projects. This paper outlines how, without a mentor, they devised a mutually supportive training technique which enabled them to acquire both knowledge and practical skills quickly. Twin Training helped them break personal barriers and provided a supportive grounding to progress to pair programming on the projects.

Datawhys Phase 1: Problem Solving to Facilitate Data Science & STEM Learning Among Summer Interns

“…Pair programming also serves to reduce cognitive load by allowing one programmer to focus on monitoring for errors, while the other can focus on writing and iterating code. Research has shown further benefits of pair programming to include understandability and maintainability of code and design (Alves & Berente, 2016;Plonka et al, 2015;Vanhanen & Korpi, 2007); higher quality and lower defect rates (Jensen, 2003;Plonka et al, 2015;Phongpaibul & Boehm, 2006); and increased knowledge transfer (Katriou & Tolias, 2009;Plonka et al, 2015;Sanders, 2002;VanDeGrift, 2004;Vanhanen & Korpi, 2007;Vanhanen & Lassenius, 2005). If we are able to offer future courses in person, we anticipate the limited online tools that facilitate pair programming will be less of an issue.…”

Knowledge transfer in pair programming: An in-depth analysis

“…Several benefits of PP have been claimed including improved understandability and maintainability of code and design [35,37], decreased defect rates [24,18,23,10,25] and knowledge transfer [21,20,23,32,34,35,36,38,40]. This paper focuses on knowledge transfer in PP.…”

“…The positive effect of PP on knowledge transfer, no matter what may be the knowledge levels of the developers, is widely acknowledged across a range of studies in industry [21,20], [38,35,23] One study by Cao and Xu [7] examined the interactions of pairs in more detail according to their expertise. They assigned students according to expertise and found that the expert asked for the novices' opinions frequently at the beginning of the session but stopped asking after realising that they did not get valuable information.…”

“…The positive effect of PP on knowledge transfer, no matter what may be the knowledge levels of the developers, is widely acknowledged across a range of studies in industry [21,20], [38,35,23] and 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 academia [32,36,34,40]. Knowledge transfer is also one of the main perceived benefits according to two surveys: Schindler [33] surveyed developers and managers in 42 Austrian companies; and Begel and Nagappan [2] conducted a web-based survey of 487 Microsoft developers.…”