Thomas Desmond, Hunter Industries
Have you heard of mob programming? How about pair programming? Mob programming builds on the pair programming idea. Mob programming brings together 3 to 5 developers all working on the same thing at the same time. One computer, one keyboard, one task, and one group of people working together.
At my organization, we mob program on all production code. We work as a group on a single task designing, coding, testing, and releasing all together. The most important practice that comes along with mob programming is the Driver Navigator paradigm. The driver is the person at the keyboard and the other members are navigators. For an idea to be implemented one of the navigators must be able to explain the idea in English for the driver to implement. This paradigm ensures that an idea can be explained and everyone else in the group can hear and comment on the idea before it gets into the code.
Mob programming provides these benefits: live code reviews, sharing knowledge, greater idea sharing, fewer meetings, more engagement, increased code experimentation, and much more.
You may think I am a tester, I do not develop code. But you can now with mobbing. Work together with the software developers to make easily testable code. Don’t let developers throw code over the fence for you to test. Mob together to create quality code.
Key takeaways include:
- Mob Programming,
- Extreme Programming
- Code Quality
- Knowledge Sharing
Thomas Desmond, 2019 Technical Presentation, Paper, Slides
