The one thing that is never mentioned, and that I'd like to see the difference for, is cost to the business.
Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
#12Upvoting because it's a fascinating idea. I find it weird they didn't really point out any down-sides, possibly because it's a corporate blog and marketing wouldn't let them. Off the top of my head though, I'd be worried about: - No time to think. I find I solve solutions by thinking about them, and I can imagine mob rule would lend itself to less thinking and more doing (fastest solution that sounds half-right gets…
I believe another reason to not pointing out the flaws come from mob thinking. It becomes very hard to criticize "the collective".
And yes, I think you have a great point on Biggest personality wins, that is already a problem on meetings. Lot's of amazing developers I've worked with had a hard time speaking in meetings...
Re: Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
#13Upvoting because it's a fascinating idea. I find it weird they didn't really point out any down-sides, possibly because it's a corporate blog and marketing wouldn't let them. Off the top of my head though, I'd be worried about: - No time to think. I find I solve solutions by thinking about them, and I can imagine mob rule would lend itself to less thinking and more doing (fastest solution that sounds half-right gets…
I've participated once or twice and watched mob programming a bunch of times. Here's some feedback, for what it's worth.
- Thinking aloud lets you solve problems in parallel, rather than sequentially. But if you're still hung up on something, you're free to be quiet and think, or think later
- If it's an ego fight, you've lost no matter how you code. Better to get it out in the open and deal with it. (And perhaps let the person go)
- I think personal space/time depends on the team, as it should. I have the opposite problem: I get bored and drift off online. I find other people in the room help me get back on track
- Nope. Actually that's the beauty of mob programming. Everybody is up to speed all of the time. It eliminates bringing people up to speed.
I think there are edge cases, one of which is bad teams, ie, bad mixes of people. But mob programming doesn't cause that. It might point it out a lot quicker, though. There are other edge cases, but the industry is still working through those.
The problem that mob programming solves is one that a heckuva lot of programmers don't even know exists: over-specialization in technology development.
Re: Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
#14Perhaps this is good for feature development, or maintenance, but, what about contracts that deal with wholly new development of a complex system? It seems like you would want to operate in parallel at least for the initial push through the architecture and boilerplate structure. Perhaps I am being disingenuous. I do love the idea of being able to not let the numerous tedious meetings interrupt progress. [edit] Thank…
> It seems like you would want to operate in parallel at least for the initial push through the architecture and boilerplate structure.
I'd disagree there, if there's a place for mob programming, it's probably here. Given every member of the team will most likely be branching features from a singular foundation, it becomes far more important for every person to have a chance to understand the core completely. This also has the side benefit of reducing friction later on by establishing basic conventions.
Re: Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
#15Upvoting because it's a fascinating idea. I find it weird they didn't really point out any down-sides, possibly because it's a corporate blog and marketing wouldn't let them. Off the top of my head though, I'd be worried about: - No time to think. I find I solve solutions by thinking about them, and I can imagine mob rule would lend itself to less thinking and more doing (fastest solution that sounds half-right gets…
And maybe the cost? If you pay 5 developers, I wonder how much more (or less) they get done by working individually or by doing this mob programming.
Re: Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
#16Mob programming because they don't trust the individual developers to deliver by themselves, mob programming because no one has a clue there and they hope there is wisdom in the crowd, and mob programming because they had nothing else to do.
Re: Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
#17I was kind of hoping this would be about calculating loss ratios on protection rackets and coding rigged numbers games.
There's always Analytics Made Skeezy if that's what you're into (http://analyticsmadeskeezy.com/blog/)
Re: Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
#18Upvoting because it's a fascinating idea. I find it weird they didn't really point out any down-sides, possibly because it's a corporate blog and marketing wouldn't let them. Off the top of my head though, I'd be worried about: - No time to think. I find I solve solutions by thinking about them, and I can imagine mob rule would lend itself to less thinking and more doing (fastest solution that sounds half-right gets…
I believe another reason to not pointing out the flaws come from mob thinking. It becomes very hard to criticize "the collective". And yes, I think you have a great point on Biggest personality wins, that is already a problem on meetings. Lot's of amazing developers I've worked with had a hard time speaking in meetings...
I wonder if you could set up a round robin programming order. Something like switching which is typing every day. So like whole team puts input while one person types, then delegate one person to drive the discussion. I don't know if that would help much though or just put it back into pair programming with extra overhead.
Re: Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
#19Upvoting because it's a fascinating idea. I find it weird they didn't really point out any down-sides, possibly because it's a corporate blog and marketing wouldn't let them. Off the top of my head though, I'd be worried about: - No time to think. I find I solve solutions by thinking about them, and I can imagine mob rule would lend itself to less thinking and more doing (fastest solution that sounds half-right gets…
> Biggest personality wins.
I'd argue that a "big enough" personality (thinking of some past cow-orkers here) cause disruption and difficulty no matter what the situation.
Right now we're hiring people with personality type as the foremost criteria. One difficult person is really too many for a small team.
Re: Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great
#20Upvoting because it's a fascinating idea. I find it weird they didn't really point out any down-sides, possibly because it's a corporate blog and marketing wouldn't let them. Off the top of my head though, I'd be worried about: - No time to think. I find I solve solutions by thinking about them, and I can imagine mob rule would lend itself to less thinking and more doing (fastest solution that sounds half-right gets…
And maybe the cost? If you pay 5 developers, I wonder how much more (or less) they get done by working individually or by doing this mob programming.
Oh yeah good point. If you're worried about pair programming not paying off mob programming is an even more expensive proposition.