Mob Programming: A Whole Team Approach - Woody Zuill

Mob programming is all the brilliant minds working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space and on the same computer.

Speaker

Agile and eXtreme programming.
It is like pair programming but with more people.
“A continuous integration of ideas”.
Communication in real time.
The team in the picture: 2 testers, product expert, database expert (dba), legacy code expert (who knows the projects in the company), 2 coding experts, and the manager.
Hunter Industries
An excellent picture of a space flight control center where they mob-control.

We learn together
Removing the bottleneck
Knowladge exchange
Because the team decided to work this way. Mob programming is voluntary by the team members because they feel can work better that way.
“We are just having a meeting”

“For and idea to go from someone’s head into the computer it must go through someone else’s hands.” - Llewellyn Falco
instead of Driver / Observer which is the old-school way of pair-programming!
The people who are doing the work can best determine how to do that work.
Weekly Team Study And Practice Session
“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” Robert Henri
People are in such a pressure to get the job done that they don’t have time to figure out how to make it easy to get the job done.
How can we work this way?
Individuals and Interactions
Kindness, Consideration, Respect
AltaVista
What’s the right number of people?
How can you possibly me productive with five people sitting at one computer? I don’t know? We just are. Is it imporant to know how? How can be production separating people to work on their own? Why do we assume that?
“Transformation comes more from pursuing profound questions than seeking practical answers.” - Peter Block
A good question leads to a better question.
Drawings by Andra Zuill