A study on quality and efficiency of a waterfall-like software development process applied by pair and solo programmers

Abstract

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) models guide trough the development or maintenance of software
products. Currently we can find several SDLC models applied in different contexts. A well-known SDLC
is the waterfall model, which its stages are performed in a sequential order. With the aim of gaining
more knowledge about a waterfall-like SDLC model, in this paper we report the findings of a controlled
experiment that studies the quality and efficiency of a waterfall-like SDLC model applied by solo and pair
programmers. The studied SDLC model is contrasted with an iterative-like SDLC model defined as ‘ad-hoc’
that is used as a control group. Concerning the quality, our results suggest that any of these two SDLC
models yield similar defect detection rates. Regarding the efficiency, results suggest that a waterfall-like
SDLC model significantly requires less number of builds to complete the programming assignments. We
did not observe significant differences between pair and solos programmers. Even though the criticism
arose around the waterfall SDLC model, our results suggest that under certain contexts a waterfall-like
SDLC model can yield beneficial effects, as the one observed concerning efficiency.