Applying pair programming practice in the improvement of software design skills, in an undergraduate course

Abstract

Teaching design patterns has proved to be a complicated topic in software engineering courses. Practitioners require mastering this technique in order to develop higher-quality programs. As part of the experiment, we used pair programming practice to solve this problem in an undergraduate classroom activity, aiming that finding the best pair configuration based on previous programming skills and character affinity, would lead us to better results. The experiment was divided into five rounds, increasing the complexity every each exercise. Afterward, we compared the score obtained by the students in the mid-term exam with last semester scores, resulting in an improvement of 0.37 points with the previous semester, which was 12.3% of the highest score (3 points).