Last week marked the day when I've been mob programming full time for a whole year. In case you don't know what mob programming is, Woody Zuill, wh...
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Hey! Some questions about this.
Can all people find a time where to speak?
Nobody is unfulfilled because they have a feeling of not been heard?
How do you take care that everyone in the group has time to speak and shine and not being afraid to do it?
I'm thinking about that because I have been a junior dev (and a girl in bonus), and sometimes it is not easy to be heard by old devs 😅 ...
Hi! This is a great question, thank you!
For me, it hasn't been an issue, but then I'm very heteronormative (white, cis, etc). With that said, from my perspective it's all about building a culture of trust. You have to create a team where everybody feels that they can speak up, talk about their feelings, ask "stupid" questions without being judged and so on. One key point in this is making sure everybody understands that if someone learns while in the mob, they are contributing to the mob. Mob programming isn't about producing the most lines of code or the greatest quality (even if that is often a perk), it's more about working together toward a common goal.
However, as I touched upon in the post, interpersonal issues will often rise to the surface when doing mob programming. This also means that there is a risk that things like sexism, racism, ableism or any other -isms; no matter if it's unconscious, structural, or whatever, might also rise to the issue. I can't tell you how to handle this if it happens, I haven't experienced it so I can never put myself in this position. What I can tell you is that in my, limited, experience you need to have a focus on working on these things. You can't just start mob programming and hope it's gonna work out, it won't. You need to put the work in to get the benefits. You need to make sure everyone understands that everyone can learn for anyone, that there can't be any prestige in the mob, that the purpose isn't to show whos best but to deliver value to the organization.
And just to repeat myself a bit, I wholeheartedly recommend reading some books by Brené Brown or watching her special on Netflix.
Please let me know if you have any more questions or if something is unclear, I'd love to chat more about this!
Thanks for your answer!
I'm happy to see that this Netflix doc is on Netflix France too! I'll take a look at that and the other books, this is super interesting.
I think to talk about all of that before the mob programming, what are the limits and what the objectives and the end could be a good idea to start.
We've started to do something similar yesterday to my job to learn about new tools we want to use in every project and learn also Elixir. ATM, it was only the setup of the project so nothing special, but I let you know what we learned with that and if I have more inputs for these issues.
That sounds great, looking forward to hear how it goes! :)
Great idea, Im trying to get my team to work closely together. I often use the term "swarm" on problems, which is very similar to what you described here.
I really like that term! Might borrow that when talking about this :)
Similar here, we have occasional swarms when something extra ugly needs attention, probably ought to do it more regularly for less exciting moments!
Wow, what an experience!
Wow this must have been extremely exhausting!
I pair-programmed full-time for a whole year and I would end up completely knackered every day
For the first couple of months, I was completely exhausted when I arrived home but after that things got better :D
Great article - I'd certainly been keen to read more detail about how your average day-to-day (and week=to-work) plans out in terms of who does what, etc!
Thank you! I've done a talk about this before so I might turn that into a post as well!
It's a great experience and my team do this once a week, in a dev class. Hardly doable for us if this happens on a daily basis.