Remote pairing... and dual editing

Yesterday, Andy Palmer and I were pairing remotely. We were about 150 miles apart at the time. We experimented with a few approaches. One of the things we tried was the Eclipse Doc Share Plugin which is part of the Eclipse Communications Framework.

In short, you are able to connect your Eclipse IDE via services like Skype and GoogleTalk so that you can collaborate in a number of ways. The DocShare plugin allows you to share the code-file you are currently editing with someone else and you can both edit it simultaneously. This screen cast by Mustafa K. Isik illustrates how this works (although I found it hard to ignore the fact that they were writing a whole lot of code without writing a test-first.)

And that brings me onto where I felt it needs to go next... If we set aside the occasional disconnection that Andy and I experienced it worked ok for a single-file, so long as all you want to do is type. If one person is typing and the other decides to refactor, the refactoring rarely completes successfully.

But, the trouble is you are sharing specific files rather than the entire workspace (which is what we really wanted). We could not share the unit test and the implementation at the same time which became quite a pain in the end - so much so that we fell-back to Yugma - Skype Edition which, wasn't that great either because screen updates were a little slow for Andy. Despite this, we made reasonable progress, but it wasn't as smooth an experience as we'd both have liked.

We'll keep trying different ways of remote collaborating and let you know how it goes... what we're interested in seeing is how we can take the innovations for remote collaboration and see how they apply for side-by-side pair-programming. We've already got a bunch of cool ideas :-)