Mob Programming at the September Agile South Coast Bournemouth meeting

At September's Agile South Coast Bournemouth meeting we discussed mob programming — think of it as pair programming turned up to 11 where the whole team shares one keyboard.

Woody Zuill discovered the technique with his team — and has been writing about it on mobprogramming.org for for a while. Woody kindly agreed to join us remotely via Skype (sorry — no recording!).

You can watch Woody talk on mobbing from Øredev 2013:

Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach from Øredev Conference on Vimeo.

Along with a time-lapse of a day of mob programming with Woody's team here:

Woody summarised mobbing as:

All the brilliant people
Working on the same problem
At the same time
On the same computer

Some of the points we discussed were:

• How mobbing helped alignment within the team
• How it removed the necessity of some "standard" practices (e.g. you don't need stand ups because everybody already knows what everybody else was doing)
• How mobbing helped foster a sense of safety since everybody was always aware of how decisions came about.

Give the talk a watch — it's worth your time.