  Pair programming (PP) has been a widespread practice for decades and is known
for facilitating knowledge exchange and improving the quality of software. Many
agilists advocated the importance of collocation, face-to-face interaction, and
physical artifacts incorporated in the shared workspace when pairing. After a
long period of forced work-from-home, many knowledge workers prefer to work
remotely two or three days per week, which is affecting practices such as PP.
In this revelatory single-case study, we aimed to understand how PP is
practiced during hybrid work when team members alternate between on-site days
and working from home. We collected qualitative and quantitative data through
11 semi-structured interviews, observations, feedback sessions, and
self-reported surveys. The interviewees were members of an agile software
development team in a Norwegian fintech company. The results presented in this
paper indicate that PP can be practiced through on-site, remote, and mixed
sessions, where the mixed mode seems to be the least advantageous. The findings
highlight the importance of adapting the work environment to suit individual
work mode preferences when it comes to PP. In the future, we will build on
these findings to explore PP in other teams and organizations practicing hybrid
work.
