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

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: