TEAM PROGRAMMING INFLUENCING FACTORS: A FIELD SURVEY

A field survey was carried out on a group of professi onal programmers to locate influencing factors on team programming or pair programming productivity. Fr om the collected responses, a variety of factors was presented. The m ost popular factor w as “personality” and the second was “cognitive/programming style,” foll owed by “c ommunication,” “programming skill,” “ability to w ork with others,” and other factors. There w e re altogether s ome twenty factors. The results were further broken d ow n into a number of su b-gr oups: ten or more years of programming experience, less than ten years of programming e xperience, twelve m onths or more of pair programming e xperience, less than twelve months of pair programming experience, manageme nt, and non-management. Overall, the experienced and management groups placed more importance on human factors such as “ability to work w ith others,” whereas the less-experienced and non-management groups gave more weight to technical factors such as programming skills. The results connote the underlying psychosocial interactions present in the team programming e nvironment. Overall, human factors such as “pers onality” were perceived to be more significant than technical factors on pair programming productivity.