Mob Programming

Summary

By Woody Zuill {NOTE: This is a draft of a work in progress. It is likely to change over time as I flesh out the examples given here. It is likely there are spelling, grammar, and other errors throughout. Please read past the mistakes. I’ll try to get things cleaned up over time.] Fading Problems I’d like to introduce a concept I am calling “Fading Problems”. After doing Mob Programming for a while we started noticing that many of the problems we previously faced were no longer affecting us. While we didn’t directly attempt to solve these problems we noticed some problems were simply fading away. Mob Programming encourages a very Agile way of dealing with things. The practices and techniques we follow support the concepts outlined in the Agile Manifesto values and principles (AMVP), and we use the AMVP to evaluate the practices and techniques we are using or want to try. Even more meaningful to us is that this almost automatically happened by simply “turning up the good” of collaborating and working as a whole team. For example, face to face (and side-by-side) communication just naturally happens when we all sit together throughout the day. Another example is by having 5 or 6 sets of eyes on our code and scrutinizing our designs leads gives us continuous focus on Technical Excellence and Simplicity, and many other good things. Here are some of the problem areas that seemed to just fade away as we built our Mob Programming and collaboration skills. Communication Problems Decision Making Problems Doing more than is barely sufficient Technical Debt Problems related to Scheduling, queuing, estimating, prioritizing Thrashing of team members, and the team Politics Meetings Communication Problems There are many communication problems in software, so I’ll just cover a few here: Latency in getting answers to questions, Communication by Email, Communication by Documentation. Problem: Getting Answers to Questions can take a lot of time. It is not uncommon for a developer (or a...