  Along with the increasing popularity of agile software development, software
work has become much more social than ever. Contemporary software teams rely on
a variety of collaborative practices, such as pair programming, the topic of
our study. Many agilists advocated the importance of collocation, face-to-face
interaction, and physical artefacts incorporated in the shared workspace, which
the COVID-19 pandemic made unavailable; most software companies around the
world were forced to send their engineers to work from home. As software
projects and teams overnight turned into dis-tributed collaborations, we
question what happened to the pair programming practice in the work-from-home
mode. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of remote pair programming in
two companies. We conducted 38 interviews with 30 engineers from Norway,
Sweden, and the USA, and used the results of a survey in one of the case
companies. Our study is unique as we collected the data longitudinally in
April/May 2020, Sep/Oct 2020, and Jan/Feb 2021. We found that pair programming
has decreased and some interviewees report not pairing at all for almost a full
year. The experiences of those who paired vary from actively co-editing the
code by using special tools to more passively co-reading and discussing the
code and solutions by sharing the screen. Finally, we found that the interest
in and the use of PP over time, since the first months of forced work from home
to early 2021, has admittedly increased, also as a social practice.
