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As agile methodologies advance in process maturity we find that most of their practices such as Test-Driven development, refactoring, and pair programming (specifically for Extreme Programming) are becoming the order of the day in a number of organizations that were traditionally sceptical about agile development. Without implying that Microsoft has ever been against agile development it is interesting to note that they now have a very comprehensive set of tools for agile development under the MSF for Agile set. Published literature has a lot of empirical evidence on the gains of using pair programming for development teams and even for teaching programming. However, the remaining challenges relate to the use of pair programming in distributed development environments. Hence, a gap still exists in determining the feasibility (especially with regards to data security) of doing pair programming for virtual teams and also developing appropriate tools for such practices. I suppose the lack of appropriate tools for such activities could have delayed the comprehensive adoption of this kind of practice. In today’s globally connected world where the world network can be traversed on a hand-held device in a split of a second, it is worth investigating what sot of tools could be securely used for virtual pair programming. Such an investigation becomes more valuable especially if we consider the ever growing complexities of viral attacks on our data and the apparent growth of other evils such as terrorism.

This paper investigates the effectiveness and security issues of using tools such NetBeans, VCN, Google docs, and some open source tools such as RSS Dashboard and many others to implement virtual pair programming. The major challenge of doing virtual pair programming is that while the code may be shared and jointly developed and edited the means of communication will not be face-to-face which happens to be a value in agile development. You may argue that skyping and the use of webcams could alleviate the problem but the benefits of face-to-face communication are hard to replace or even emulate. Collaborative online tools have been used mainly for more social activities where data security may not be of as much value as in the development of private applications for clients.

The methodology used in this research involves reviewing published literature on company projects that have used virtual pair programming and collecting data about the current practices of virtual pair programming through a questionnaire. This has provided enough background and understanding to inform the development of a more effective approach to the implementation of virtual pair programming. Therefore a comprehensive framework for the secure use of virtual pair programming will be designed as a proposed solution to this problem.

The benefit of such an approach is that distributed teams would then be able to practice pair programming despite the geographical and security challenges. The other benefit is improved knowledge in the application of relatively new technologies such as virtual pair programming, which has been in use since the emergence of agile development in early 2000 and the use of one of the most convenient inventions of our time –the World Wide Web.