Mob Programming: A Whole Team Approach

GOTO Copenhagen 2017

Mob Programming is a development practice where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer. It is a whole-team approach to doing all the work the team does including designing, coding, testing, and working with the customers, users and other stakeholders. This is an evolutionary step beyond pair programming and accentuates face-to-face communication, team alignment, collaboration, and self-organizing team concepts of the Agile approach to software development.

Mob Programming can be a highly effective approach to software development. There are numerous teams doing Mob Programming all over the world, including distributed teams, and there have been a number of positive reports of success. Please join me as I share how the concept got started, the benefits, techniques we use, and some of the problems we've faced.

Structure This presentation provides a description of Mob Programming, how is came to be, the benefits we've seen, and some tips on how to do it yourself. It is presented as a talk with slides, with some audience participation.

Learning outcome You will learn enough to try this out on your own with your team or with some friends. Along the way we'll answer a lot of the questions you might have including:

• How do we set things up?
• Who should be part of the team?
• What is the right-size for a team?
• How can we work together with just one computer?
• Why would we want to do this?
• Is it productive?