EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF DISTRIBUTED PAIR PROGRAMMING

Pair programming provides many benefits, both to the programmers and to the product that they develop. However, pair programming is limited to those situations in which the developers can collocate, preventing its benefits from being enjoyed by the widest possible audience. A software tool that allowed the pair to work from separate locations would address this limitation. This paper presents some initial results from a distributed pair programming experiment in which students in an introductory programming class used such a tool. Student perceptions of distributed pair programming are also discussed

Towards Automating Source-consistent UML Refactorings

With the increased interest in refactoring, UML tool vendors seek ways to support software developers in applying a (sequence of) refactoring(s)

Bauhaus – A Tool Suite for Program Analysis and Reverse Engineering

Abstract. The maintenance and evolution of critical software with high requirements for reliability is an extremely demanding, time consuming and expensive task. Errors introduced by ad-hoc changes might have disastrous effects on the system and must be prevented under all circumstances, which requires the understanding of the details of source code and system design. This paper describes Bauhaus, a comprehensive tool suite that supports program understanding and reverse engineering on all layers of abstraction, from source code to architecture.

One-year survival and neurological outcome after pediatric cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

OBJECTIVE: Reported survival after cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in children varies considerably. We aimed to identify predictors of 1-year survival and to assess long-term neurological status after in- or outpatient CPR. DESIGN: Retrospective review of the medical records and prospective follow-up of CPR survivors. SETTING: Tertiary care pediatric university hospital. PATIENTS AND METHODS: During a 30-month period, 89 in- and outpatients received advanced CPR. Survivors of CPR were prospectively followed-up for 1 year. Neurological outcome was assessed by the Pediatric Cerebral Performance Category scale (PCPC). Variables predicting 1-year survival were identified by multivariable logistic regression analysis. INTERVENTIONS: None. RESULTS: Seventy-one of the 89 patients were successfully resuscitated. During subsequent hospitalization do-not-resuscitate orders were issued in 25 patients. At 1 year, 48 (54%) were alive, including two of the 25 patients with out-of-hospital CPR. All patients died, who required CPR after trauma or near drowning, when CPR began >10 min after arrest or with CPR duration >60 min. Prolonged CPR (21-60 min) was compatible with survival (five of 19). At 1 year, 77% of the survivors had the same PCPC score as prior to CPR. Predictors of survival were location of resuscitation, CPR during peri- or postoperative care, and duration of resuscitation. A clinical score (0-15 points) based on these three items yielded an area under the ROC of 0.93. CONCLUSIONS: Independent determinants of long-term survival of pediatric resuscitation are location of arrest, underlying cause, and duration of CPR. Long-term survivors have little or no change in neurological status

Is External Code Quality correlated with Programming Experience or Feelgood Factor?

This paper is inspired by an article by Müller and Padberg who study the feelgood factor and programming experience, as candidate drivers for the pair programming performance. We not only reveal a possible threat to validity of empirical results presented by Müller and Padberg but also perform an independent research. Our objective is to provide empirical evidence whether external code quality is correlated with the feelgood factor, or with programming experience. Our empirical study is based on a controlled experiment with MSc students. It appeared that the external code quality is correlated with the feelgood factor, and programming experience, in the case of pairs using a classic (test-last) testing approach. The generalization of the results is limited due to the fact that MSc students participated in the study. The research revealed that both the feelgood factor and programming experience may be the external code quality drivers

Comparing Private and Public Sector on Information Systems Development and Maintenance Efficiency

Part 5: EvaluationInternational audienceThis paper provides a comparison between public and private organizations on key figures relative to the information systems support activities. Many have claimed that public sector has a less satisfactory conduct of information system support than private sector. In this article we present selected data from survey investigations performed among Norwegian organizations on how they conduct information systems development and maintenance. This investigation has earlier been compared with similar investigations of this sort. A major finding from the previous comparisons is that even if we witness large changes in the underlying implementation technology and approaches used, a number of aspects such as the overall percentage of time used for maintaining and evolving systems in production compared to time used for development is remarkably stable. When we compare public and private organizations in the last survey, we find a small difference on some variables, but these are not statistically significant, thus cannot be used to conclude that IT development and evolutions is conducted more poorly in public sector than in private sector