Distributed pair programming: An empirical study

Pair programming provides many benefits, both to the programmers and to the product that they develop. However, pair programming is limited to those situations in which the developers can collocate, preventing its benefits from being enjoyed by the widest possible audience. A software tool that allowed the pair to work from separate locations would address this limitation. This paper presents some initial results from a distributed pair programming experiment in which students in an introductory programming class used such a tool. Student perceptions of distributed pair programming are also discussed