Summer '03 Projects

My first day Laurie and I met to discuss what I would be doing over the course of 10 weeks. She informed me that I would be working with 3 graduate students and their three separate projects.

Hema and I are focusing on pair programming. The idea of pair programming centralizes itself around programming with at least one other individual. Some computer science classes at NCSU were given surveys with questions aimed at analyzing their experiences with pair programming. We are trying to decipher whether pair programming affects cheating and conceptual learning. We are also looking at the affects of pair rotation.

We are also working with a pair programming tool. This tool is designed to be used by professors and teaching assistants in aiding them to make programming pairs for assignments. The user can make pairs based on the Myer's Briggs personality type, skill level (formulated by using midterm grades), or random selection.

Dright, Sarah, and I are working with Rational XDE. We are developing tutorials for the software.

Lucas and I are researching the affects of eXtreme Programming practices on software development. Lucas had already been working with William Krebs at IBM in analyzing his experience with using the 12 practices of XP. Lucas and I are revamping William Krebs' XP survey to make it more robust. We will use this survey to collect data on how development teams are using the practices of eXtreme Programming.

Lucas and I will travel to Dallas, Texas to work with Sabre in determining whether XP increases productivity and efficiency. We will be using the Empirical Study Hypotheses as outlined in chapter 29 of Extreme Programming Perspectives. We will also take into account Barry Boehm and Richard Turner's thoughts in "Using Risk to Balance Agile and Plan-Driven Methods."