Pair Programming
A development practice where two engineers work together on the same problem while continuously discussing and reviewing the work.
Plain English
Two people collaborate closely on one change with one usually controlling the code at a time.
In context
Pair programming combines implementation and real-time reasoning and may rotate who drives and who navigates while working in person or through remote collaboration tools.
Example
“Let's pair program the migration logic because the failure cases are unfamiliar.”
When you'll hear this
- complex implementation
- mentoring
- debugging
Common misunderstanding
Pair programming does not require sharing one physical computer and is more collaborative than asking for review only after the code is written.
Also known as
pairingdeveloper pairingremote pairing
Commonly used by
Related terms
Often compared with
Updated: 2026-08-28
