Experiment Design: A Guide to the Goal-Question-Metric Approach

Written by pairprogramming | Published 2025/08/19
Tech Story Tags: pair-programming | pair-versus-solo-programming | software-engineering | design-of-experiments | latin-square-design | programming-efficiency | what-is-pair-programming | goal-question-metric-approach

TLDRLearn how to define a software engineering experiment using the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) framework. This article outlines the design and hypotheses for a study on pair vs. solo programming, focusing on duration and effort.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

2. Experiment Definition

We use the Goal-Question-Metric approach [2] for defining the experiment. This approach facilitates to identify the object of study, purpose, quality focus, perspective and context of an experiment. We define the experiment as follows:

Study pair and solo programming with the purpose of evaluating possible differences between these two programming types with respect to duration and effort. This study is conducted from the point of view of the researcher under an academic context. This context is composed by juniors students enrolled in a course of DOE where they will write, by pairs or individually, two small programs.

From the experiment definition we derive the following hypotheses:

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 2025/08/19