Virtual Assistant for Pair Programming (VAPP)

Student: Megan Simpson

Major: Computer Science

Mentors: Dr. Kris Ghosh

Department: Computer Science

Virtual Assistant for Pair Programming (VAPP)

Pair programming is a practice in which two programmers work collaboratively at one computer on the same task. Prior research provides ample evidence that pair programming improves debugging and increases code quality in industry [2] and academia [3]. Recently, the increase of online delivery of computing courses has necessitated the use of novel ways to incorporate pair programming [3]. A bot interacts as a gender-neutral agent and thereby, eliminates gender bias [3].
The goal of the project to create a bot that will perform as a virtual individual that will be paired with the programmer. The aims of this project are following:
1. Create a bot that will form a virtual pair in programming tasks with a programmer.
2. Evaluate the effectiveness of the bot in improvement of code quality and debugging.
The computer science methods that I will use in creating a bot are natural language processing to extract the features of program and machine learning.