Mob Programming is a software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer. This is similar to pair programming, where two people sit at the same computer and collaborate on the same code at the same time. However, with Mob Programming, we extend the collaboration to everyone on the team while still using a single computer for writing the code and doing other work.
In addition to software coding, the team works together to do almost all the work a typical software development team tackles, such as defining stories, designing, testing, deploying software, and working with the customer, business expert, or Product Owner.
Almost all work is handled as “working meetings” or workshops, and all the people involved in creating the software are considered to be team members, including the customer/product owner. We work this way more or less all day long, every day. In other words, this is an evolutionary step beyond the Extreme Programming concept of pair programming. We strive to accentuate and amplify concepts such as face-to-face and side-by-side communication, team alignment, collaboration, whole team involvement, continuous code review, and the “self-organizing team”, to name a
few.
In this book, Woody Zuil and Kevin Meadows share their “Mob Programming” style. The pair cover the techniques that they use in their daily work, how they discovered this way of working, the benefits they see from “Mobbing”, the problems that they have overcome, and how you can incorporate some of their ideas even though you don’t have a way to adopt Mob Programming full time.
Meet the authors
Woody has been programming computers for over 30 years, and is currently the Agile Coach for a development team – the “Mob”. For the past 15+ years. He has worked continuously as an Agile Coach and/or developer in both large and small environments and has trained over 20 teams and 200+ developers in Agile practices. Woody believes code must be simple, clean, testable, and maintainable in order to respond to change while quickly delivering working software.
“I have a passion for bringing unmaintainable code back into a manageable, healthy state”
Kevin been working with software since the days of dual floppy drives (remember those?). He has worked in environments ranging from scientific research to small startups to large enterprise outfits. Along the way, Kevin has always found the process of software development to be especially interesting. After watching so many Waterfall projects crash and burn and thinking “there has to be a better way” He could not help but wonder “what took so long?” when Agile methods finally appeared.
“When Woody showed me Mobbing I realized it was the next logical step.”
The book is available on leanpub and is 95% complete.
