Remote Pair Programming in Virtual Reality

There are many benefits to pair programming, including increased knowledge transfer, higher quality code, increased code comprehension, and team bonding. Unfortunately, when programmers work remotely, it becomes more challenging to collaborate. Virtual Reality (VR) technology has become increasingly popular in domains outside of software engineering. It allows humans to experience increased social presence, a key for collaboration, while still working remotely. In the last few years, and even more so recently, remote work has become very common for software engineers. In this paper, we explore remote pair programming and code comprehension in virtual reality. We conducted remote pair programming experiments with a total of 40 professional programmers. Half of the participants pair programmed using VR as a tool and the other half used a screen sharing system to collaborate. We found that programmers solved almost twice as many bugs using VR. We also found that the time taken to solve bugs was, on average, reduced when working in the VR environment than using the state of the art.