Abstract
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 sort 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 all sorts of viral attacks on our data and the apparent growth of other evils such as terrorism. This paper investigates the prevalence, effectiveness and security issues of using online collaboration tools such as NetBeans, VI\lC, Google docs, and some open source tools such as RSS Dashboard and many others to implement virtual pair programming.