An async kind of pair programming

Can pair programming be done in a way that is compatible with async communication?

async_jam

Pair programming is described by the original c2 wiki as a process in which “two engineers participate in one development effort at one workstation”. It would seem the process is inherently synchronous, at least as originally described and practiced.

I experimented with pair programming at my first industrial programming job at Morgan Stanley. It was 2006-2008 and two fads were happening in parallel: “agile” software management techniques and “extreme programming”, with a particular emphasis on test-driven development with Java.

I occasionally found pair programming to be effective, but noticed my results varied wildly depending on the engineer I paired with and the problem we worked on. Some people really enjoyed the “brain swarming” of having two heads attack a problem. Other people found it cumbersome and interruptive. Some problems seemed so indivisible that it always ended up that one person drove, and the other person merely watched. In the end, I couldn’t really say whether I benefited from it, despite many hours of experimentation.

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