Monitoring an OOP Course Through Assignments in a Distributed Pair Programming System

Abstract

Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) is widely known to promote collaboration and knowledge sharing among novice programmers, while it engages them in carrying out programming assignments. Moreover, DPP is a means of experiencing agile software development techniques that are considered important in the software market. In this paper, we share some experiences on using the DPP system of SCEPPSys for carrying out assignments in an undergraduate Object Oriented Programming (OOP) course. Specifically, we focus on the information recorded during problem solving and the statistics reported by the system and how this information can be utilized for monitoring both the course regarding the fulfillment of its goals and the programming habits and progress of students. Some proposals are made towards extending the possibilities of SCEPPSys for generating automatically more sophisticated reports that would support instructors in more successfully monitoring a course and students. The ultimate goal of such an enhanced monitoring is to improve students’ software quality.