Learning to Write Programs with Others: Collaborative Quadruple Programming

Abstract

Most software development is carried out by teams of software engineers working collaboratively to achieve the desired goal. Consequently software development education not only needs to develop a student's ability to write programs that can be easily comprehended by others and be able to comprehend programs written by others, but also the ability to write programs with others. However, the academic curriculum hardly puts any structured emphasis on nurturing these competencies. Hence, collaboration in program development needs special attention in our engineering curriculum. For this, we propose a three-staged model for collaborative program development, termed as the Collaborative Quadruple Programming, which is an extension of the collaborative pair programming approach proposed earlier by the second author. The proposed model combines all the levels of collaborative engagements in the four-dimensional taxonomy of pedagogic engagements in software development education proposed by the second author.