A 4 weeks mob programming
It's sound strange at first, difficult to manage, and certainly understanding the reasons behind and how can we take advantage of this practice introduced a couple of years ago.
Mob programming is an approach introduced to the agile world in the purpose of helping the teams establish a common development mindset, sharing the same principles to design and code.
A few months ago my team and I started a new project aiming at providing a digital platform
for developers to help them accelerate their time to market. The platform offers a multiple
services such as creating web application scaffold, source code repositories, build pipeline
with all high-quality stages like security check, team management and deployment environment.
Obviously the project size is enormous and requires a high quality architecture design, distributed systems best practices and synchronous coding styles so during the scoping and framing phases we decided to adopt the mob programming approach to share and communicate architecture decisions, lean our performances with the goal to promote our autonomy when it comes to developing user stories independently or separately.
our mob programming sessions are scheduled for the whole workday for 4 weeks consecutive, we team up in the same room having only one keyboard and one big screen. Each developer takes control of the keyboard and code for 10 minutes. I believe that respecting the mob programming rules is a key to success in this experience which is full of learning for developers but also for the quality of the product as we build together the skeleton.
I would like to share with you all the rules we followed during our sessions:
- having a comfortable and spacious room with all the necessary tools like big screen and a mechanic keyboard ✌
- defining roles before each session, we've had the Driver who types in code and Navigator who discuss the idea and guide the Driver.
- respecting timing is a key, it's better to hand the keyboard over with a broken test than overtaking.
- we've been driven by basic user stories at the beginning in order to focus on technical architecture.
- we discuss, debate and argue our ideas when we think they are right, no one or idea should be discarded.
- Believing that there no strict model or perfect one to follow, a retrospective is held weekly to evaluate our mob programming enrollment.
Before experiencing the mob programming I was asking my self how can will be productive by letting 8 developers to work on the same thing for weeks, I confess how was am I surprised by what we were able to deliver, a full feature bringing a real added value to our customers. If you ask me for the secret the only answer I have is we were doing the work the most perfect way it could, avoiding broking the build, hard merges, and enduring exchanges by emails or pull requests to agree on a design, interoperability, components communication, and best practice adoption. In addition discussing ideas and approaches helped us a lot to select the best ones.
During these sessions, we build a wonderful team spirit, communication protocols, and a homogeneous mindset. without omitting the impact on our motivation and commitment. I was really happy with this journey and the results harvested at the end.
I highly recommend giving this approach a try even though for a short time, I consider practicing is the best way to understand, evaluate and conclude if it could bring the right expectations for your team.