Controlling Confounding Variables in Gender Bias Studies of Remote Pair Programming

Abstract and 1 Introduction

1.1 The twincode platform

1.2 Related Work

2 Research Questions

3 Variables

3.1 Independent Variables

3.2 Dependent Variables

3.3 Confounding Variables

4 Participants

5 Execution Plan and 5.1 Recruitment

5.2 Training and 5.3 Experiment Execution

5.4 Data Analysis

Acknowledgments and References

The confounding variables that will be controlled during the experiment are the following.

\ Subject’s technical skills To control the variability caused by each subject on their partner, pairs are kept the same during the entire experiment, although the subjects are not informed about this fact until the end of the experiment. Ideally, this would make the conditions of the two in–pair tasks the same except for the programming exercises (see below) and for the perceived gender in the case of the experimental group.

\ Programming exercises In order to avoid potential differences among the programming exercises used during in–pair tasks, they are of similar difficulty and are randomly assigned.

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:::info Authors:

(1) Amador Durán, SCORE Lab, I3US Institute, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain ([email protected]);

(2) Pablo Fernández, SCORE Lab, I3US Institute, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain ([email protected]);

(3) Beatriz Bernárdez, I3US Institute, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain ([email protected]);

(4) Nathaniel Weinman, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA ([email protected]);

(5) Aslı Akalın, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA ([email protected]);

(6) Armando Fox, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA ([email protected]).

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:::info This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.

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