Development of a Set of Best Practices for Distributed Pair Programming

This paper presents a research idea related to the use of Pair Programming in the context of Distributed Software Development. Organizations have been distributing their software development activities around the world for over a decade now which requires distributed teams to work together to achieve the project goal. Agile methods have been recently adopted by software engineers aiming to provide faster and more valuable results to the customer by fostering face-to-face communication, rapid response to changes, among others. Despite sounding contradicting, it has been claimed that distributed software development have been adopting agile methods as a strategy to make distributed teams more productive. Pair programming is one of the agile practices used in such context. It has been argued that pair programming in distributed software development contributes to increase the product quality and the productivity. For this reason, the goal of this idea proposal is to understand the advantages and challenges of Distributed Pair Programming, and to develop a set of best practices to facilitate its adoption.