Initial evaluation of the brain activity under different software development situations

Abstract

The use of biological signals to understand software development has become more popular in the last few years but poses new challenges with respect to the overall experimental settings. In this paper we present such challenges and the approach we took to overcome them. We illustrate our approach by evaluating two programming situations: pair programming and programming with music. The subjects involved in the experimentation are mostly students, however, in the largest case we involved graduate students coming from industry with at least three years of working experience. The results in general support the validity of this approach and encourage to go further in this research line. Moreover, as a byproduct, the analysis of pair programming confirms, from a biological perspective, early hypotheses that pair programming induces higher level of concentration.