Prof. Dr. Armin Heinzl was invited by the Software Institute of the Informatics Faculty of the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) Lugano to present his research on the impact of pair programming on team performance.
His talk explained how pair programming fosters shared mental models of developers in agile software development teams which in turn improve the backup behavior of the team members. Scrum teams with a high level of backup behavior demonstrate higher levels of team performance, particularly if they are challenged by novel tasks. The presentation was based on a scholarly submission that has recently been accepted by the A+-Journal “Information Systems Research (ISR)”. The article was co-authored by Thomas Kude, ESSEC Business School, Christoph Schmidt, the Boston Consulting Group, and Sunil Mithas, University of South Florida. Professor Kude received his Diploma, Doctorate and Habilitation from the University of Mannheim. Dr. Schmidt was the first team member on the InES project “SAP Lean Development” which was launched soon after the founding of the InES. Today, he is a project leader at the Boston Consulting Group in Boston, Massachusetts. Sunil Mithas visited Mannheim in 2013 for the first time at the ICOIS conference which was co-organized by the InES, and subsequently in 2017 as a Visiting Professor. The ISR paper is forthcoming under the title “How Pair Programming Influences Team Performance: The Role of backup-behavior, shared mental models, and task novelty”.