I commented on Healthy Software Developer that mobbing saw the greatest increase in knowledge and productivity in my entire career. I found mobbing quite intimidating and stressful to begin with. I don’t think I’m alone as a developer in often feeling that I don’t know enough and require more depth of knowledge in a given technology. I remember assigning tickets to a contractor and, after describing each piece of work, he said, _”Yep, easy!”_ This encapsulates an attitude among many developers that they should be seen as all-knowing. With pair programming, one is only exposing the holes in one’s knowledge to one person. Whereas mobbing exposes them to a group. This is not a problem in a relaxed environment with long term colleagues, but can be stressful in new jobs and projects. Fortunately, my experience was that coders, testers and UXAs were all navigators and drivers at some point which meant that the breadth and depth of knowledge was very varied and yet the collaboration across the team and disciplines created such a good vibe that our productivity was very high. Admittedly, after a day of mobbing, I was finished, but satisfied. Mobbing also inspired me to fill any holes in my knowledge that were revealed during the day’s session.

I love it!

Way interesting! Question: how do you evaluate who should get promoted?

codecentric unconference brought me here :)

thanks for sharing; I was looking for this. But is this scrum team? If yes, there would also be QE in it. How do you deal with that situation?

thanks for sharing; I was looking for this. But is this scrum team? If yes, there would also be QE in it. How do you deal with that situation?

I am currently hiring people to work this way. Ping me if your interested.

Mob programming, WTF?! All I see is a bunch of people talking endlessly and no code being written. When I sit down to code, I produce 50-100 LOC/hour. Summing up the actual time typing over the whole day, these guys have not written much more than maybe 10 lines in a day. Mob programming is BS.

Wow that's really interesting. I bet code quality is pretty high with this method.

Woody, was nice us enough to spend a whole day teaching us Mob programming at Mitchell International with a team that worked as individuals. They soon learned how to work together, test driven development, breaking down coding attempts to the smallest segments possible, finding patterns, real time re factoring, team communication, constant dynamic improvement all day, migrating to the best ideas the team has to offer, team spirit that will results in better products and productivity, .. This approach has advantages that you will not discover until you give it a try. By the end of the day we had a team that functioned as a high performing team.

Interesting approach. Extreme Programming turned up to 11. So what applications have been written this way? Anything well-known and widely-distributed?

Do you have mob-change-management as well? I used to do pair programming but the guy I was working with was not as nerd as me and the team was misbalanced. Anyway, seems I need to change the paradigm.

Fun time lapse.

15 min rotations looks like a good way to avoid burnout

He brings his own healthy lunch. The stomach is an organ not a machine.

So why didn't the Asian get invited to lunch?

The product we are working on in this video is an internally used business application. We produce very high quality applications with very few( if any) bugs. Our customers are internal partners who work closely with us to determine their needs and how to best fulfill those needs..

This is for sure a very fun way of working!! :-) What was the product? Did the customer see an improvment of quality?

I want music next time!

You get better at estimates by NOT DOING THEM. Ever.

This type of work requires people to collaborate continuously, especially when you work with data that is hard to get to or hard to understand. Working together like this helps the team traverse data related issues quickly and efficiently and that is one of my favorite things about mobbing.

But how do we get better at estimates?

I couldn't imagine working any other way. We're just getting started with this.