Construct Validity: A Key Threat to Pair Programming Research

Written by pairprogramming | Published 2025/08/23
Tech Story Tags: pair-programming | pair-versus-solo-programming | software-engineering | design-of-experiments | latin-square-design | what-is-pair-programming | construct-validity | pair-programming-research

TLDRExplore the threat of construct validity in a pair programming experiment, focusing on how a lack of subject experience can skew results. Learn how researchers plan to reinforce this validity in future studies through training.via the TL;DR App

Table of Links

Abstract and 1. Introduction

2. Experiment Definition

3. Experiment Design and Conduct

3.1 Latin Square Designs

3.2 Subjects, Tasks and Objects

3.3 Conduct

3.4 Measures

4. Data Analysis

4.1 Model Assumptions

4.2 Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)

4.3 Treatment Comparisons

4.4 Effect Size and Power Analysis

5. Experiment Limitations and 5.1 Threats to the Conclusion Validity

5.2 Threats to Internal Validity

5.3 Threats to Construct Validity

5.4 Threats to External Validity

6. Discussion and 6.1 Duration

6.2 Effort

7. Conclusions and Further Work, and References

5.3 Threats to Construct Validity

Construct validity threats concern the relationship between theory and observation. An issue in our experiment that might have affected this validity is that subjects had little or no previous experience with pair programming and they had not programmed with their partners before. These experiment results might be conservative with respect to the effect of pair programming. In subsequent experiment replications, we will reinforce this validity by assigning training programs to pairs.

Authors:

(1) Omar S. Gómez, full time professor of Software Engineering at Mathematics Faculty of the Autonomous University of Yucatan (UADY);

(2) José L. Batún, full time professor of Statistics at Mathematics Faculty of the Autonomous University of Yucatan (UADY);

(3) Raúl A. Aguilar, Faculty of Mathematics, Autonomous University of Yucatan Merida, Yucatan 97119, Mexico.


This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED license.


Written by pairprogramming | Pair Programming AI Companion. You code with me, I code with you. Write better code together!
Published by HackerNoon on 2025/08/23