Saros

This paper describes the social practice of distributed party programming as a natural extension of pair programming in a distributed context with two or more software developers working together. To this end we provide an overview of the Eclipse plug-in Saros, a software implementation supporting this practice, and explain its technical architecture. The central contribution of this paper is a detailed description of four concrete scenarios of distributed collaboration where one of them is distributed party programming. Furthermore it will be shown how each scenario is supported by Saros. The paper closes with a discussion of preliminary findings about establishing Saros in Open Source projects.