Easy Guide to Remote Pair Programming - Adrian Bolboacă, InfoQ

This resource first appeared in issue #83 on 17 Jul 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Remote, Technical Leadership: Software Development, Managing A Team: Knowledge Sharing

Bolboacă walks us through the how and why of remote pair programming, and InfoQ helpfully provides key takeaways (quoted verbatim below):

Remote pair programming can be an extremely powerful tool if implemented well, in the context where it fits.
You need to assess your current organization, technical context, and the time needed to absorb change before rushing into using remote pair programming. There are useful sets of questions for that.
Social programming means learning easier together, pair programming is a form of social programming, and ensemble programming (also known as mob programming) is another form of social programming.
Tooling is important when using remote pair programming, and you can learn how to make the experience great, depending on your context.
Remote pair programming doesn’t work everywhere, and we need to understand and accept that not everyone likes pairing.

The points that stand out to me is that pair programming isn’t a good thing in and of itself, it’s a practice that can help you achieve specific good things; and you’re more likely to achieve the good things you want if you keep the goals in mind. Maybe it’s knowledge transfer and mentoring juniors, or a second pair of eyes on some particularly sensitive code, or being faster than waiting for a code review on a PR. Those are all great objectives, but they’re different, and how you roll it out the practice will affect how well those objectives are met.

Bolboacă also highlights areas where it’s not likely to work well:

Very soliary developers
It’s not supported by the organizaiton
It’s introduced in a rush
It’s used on simple tasks