What is Pair Testing? — UK Software Development Guide

4 min readJune 2025ClickMasters Technical TeamReviewed by James Whitmore, CTO
what is pair testing qa

Direct Answer

Pair testing is a quality assurance technique where two people — typically a developer and a QA engineer, or two QA engineers — test software together at one workstation. One person operates the application while the other observes, documents findings, and guides the testing strategy. Pair testing is particularly effective for exploratory testing and for complex or security-critical areas of software.

Pair-testing in the UK

Pair testing has specific value for UK compliance-critical software. WCAG 2.1 accessibility testing benefits from pairing a sighted tester with a blind screen reader user — the combination catches many more issues than either alone. Security testing of authentication and access control flows benefits from developer-QA pairing: the developer understands the implementation, the QA applies adversarial thinking. ClickMasters uses pair testing for WCAG 2.1 manual screen reader testing (mandatory for DTAC Domain 5 and PSBAR compliance) and for security-critical flow testing.

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