Programming teachers often seek new ways to help their students succeed more in their studies. We aim to characterize the students who succeed in a second year Computer Science programming exercise, and to identify factors that may be controlled or acquired to enhance success. We study several factors that influence students‟ success. Results show that actual time investment and working in pairs on the exercise are significant factors for predicting success. Other measure studied was the ability of students to accurately estimate the required amount of work. We found that students have poor accuracy in their effort estimate compared to the actual work. Satisfaction from working on the exercise was found to have positive correlation with the exercise grade. We also studied the students‟ ability to accurately estimate their grades and the relation between actual success and their self-judgement, and found a positive correlation between being more pessimistic about the expected grade, the time invested, and the actual grade. Results can be translated into useful recommendations for programming teachers as well as for team leaders.