Evaluating the Effectiveness of Extreme Programming Practices: Pair Programming and Refactoring

Software development is a mentally complicated task. Different software development methodologies and quality assurance methods are used in order to attain high quality, reliable, and bug free software. eXtreme Programming (XP) is a software development discipline in the family of agile methodologies that contributes towards quality improvement using dozen practices. There are few important practices in the XP are Pair Programming, Refactoring and Test Driven Development. Pair or collaborative programming is a software development technique where two programmers develop software side by side at one computer. One person types in while the other reviews each line of code making it possible to create and continuously review what is being created. Refactoring which can be defined as “a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing its observable behavior”. Although there has been a large amount of research investigations for these concepts, but there has been little work done in quantitative approach. The main objective of the research is to develop a software development model using all these practices. The software development model proposed in such a way that all the three activities accompanies all the phases of software development. This work also shows the evaluation of effectiveness of the proposed software development model.