Mob Programming – The Good, the Bad and the Great

I don't know about day-to-day or in a classroom setting though. Whenever I did pair programming in college, one of the partners would often be overpowering in terms of skills and intelligence, and would spend most of the time getting the other up to pace. Which is great, except the laggards would often pretend to understand in fear of being looked upon as stupid.

As someone who's been on both side of the dynamics, yeahh, not sure about classroom settings. I would love to attend your workshops though!

I really wish we had hard data on this. But we did not have reliable metrics in place before. I would however argue that there isn't data the other way either ;)

But in lack of hard data, I can say what our gut feeling is. We started with mob programming because we felt we had a total inability to deliver anything (lots of half done work), and now we feel like we are delivery frequently with high quality.

Since you all have been asking, here's a negative excerpt from an earlier version of this post, which unfortunately got cut before the final draft. I'm starting to feel like we should write a follow up post now, but in the mean time, here's this:

"It was not all positive. Finding a smooth way of working took a long time, and we lost team members along the way, presumably at least partly because they did not enjoy this. Personality differences became painfully obvious, and a lot of time was spent talking openly and honestly to each other on how to stop rubbing each other the wrong way.

Taking on new people is both easier and harder in this setting. The bonus is that they will come up to speed with the work a lot sooner. The drawback is that you have to redo the personality resolution dance before work will run smoothly again."

My take on the introvert/extrovert thing:

I'm definitely one of the extroverts on the team (even though I, like introverts, get completely exhausted by too much interaction). I thrive in a communicative environment. We have a pretty fair mix of people on the team, and we've spent some time trying to find the balance of that, leaving room for people to leave the mob when needed etc. We usually do not mob for eight hours a day - reality hits, someone comes in early, someone likes to work late, we attend meetings, we are all parents and sometimes have to work from home, and we try to encourage each other to leave the mob at times. My guess is that we mob approximately 70% of the time. My impression is that our introverts, while finding it tiresome, are a lot more expressive and take up more social space in the group than before. The extroverts have worked hard on stepping back and leaving space. We still have ways to go, but we're getting there.

We are just one team in an organization of many teams working on different parts and features of the same system. We do not feel that we need to understand 100% of everything all the time, but our general knowledge has most definitely improved, and rapidly so. We all feel more comfortable around our own components than before.

Do you find problems with bridging background knowledge across roles?

For instance, you have programmers with 5+ years experience reading/writing code. They understand basic data-structures & design patterns through second-nature. Does this create conflict and/or dis-engagement between the programmers & the non-programmers (management, QA, etc)?

Typically, I work on teams with scarce technical employees. Most of the team are there offloading work that doesn't require the coding background.