If you have a project you are working on in Access and are looking for another pair of eyes or some advice on how to work through adding a new feature to your system, you might find pair programming a valuable asset.

In order to pair program, you have a few options.

One option is to work with someone in the same room as you. Perhaps you have a friend who’s interested in Access or work with other hobbyists. Perhaps you’ve connected with others in the Access community via other resources out there or in an Access User Group or at an Access conference. If they are local and you can sit together and trade control of the keyboard and mouse, this works really well.

If you don’t have someone local, you can still do remote pairing.

Some software to help you do this would be using Microsoft Teams (fully featured if you have an Office 365 account), or having a paid Zoom account.

The application and code should all remain on just one computer during the process. There is no need to try to move the code between computers when trading keyboards as this would tend to be difficult and require care to keep things synced as you trade control.

You should set up some goals of what you want to accomplish and if you’ve never done this before, it’s wise to take it slow. Just programming together for 30 – 60 minutes to start with.

Make your goals to make the software work in very small steps, just adding a single field at a time for example and then making sure it’s all working as expected.

Pair programming as I’m putting it forward is part of a software development strategy in which you do development in very small increments and set up tests to make sure your progress is stable and all features continue to work as you make changes. The strategy starts with customer or user requirements of some kind like, I need to enter orders into a database. Or, I need to change the validation conditions of an order. Then with a team of developers you make small incremental changes, with the ability of showing them to the customer right away as needed. This requires a development environment and a delivery pipeline already set up to make small changes live when desired.

Safety in knowing your code works because of good testing habits makes it easier to code together quickly. Multiple minds working with different viewpoints really creates a strong and thought through system that will be easy to change and be confident in!