An Empirical Study of the Optimum Team Size Requirement in a Collaborative Computer Programming/Learning Environment

Abstract

Pair programming has been widely acclaimed the best way to go in computer programming. Recently, collaboration involving more subjects has been shown to produce better results in programming environments. However, the optimum group size needed for the collaboration has not been adequately addressed. This paper seeks to inculcate and acquaint the students involved in the study with the spirit of team work in software projects and to empirically determine the effective (optimum) team size that may be desirable in programming/learning real life environments. Two different experiments were organized and conducted. Parameters for determining the optimal team size were formulated. Volunteered participants of different genders were randomly grouped into five parallel teams of different sizes ranging from 1 to 5 in the first experiment. Each team size was replicated six times. The second experiment involved teams of same gender compositions (males or females) in different sizes. The times (efforts) for problem analysis and coding as well as compile-time errors (bugs) were recorded for each team size. The effectiveness was finally analyzed for the teams. The study shows that collaboration is highly beneficial to new learners of computer programming. They easily grasp the programming concepts when the learning is done in the company of others. The study also demonstrates that the optimum team size that may be adopted in a collaborative learning of computer programming is four.