Mob Programming

Mob programming is a practice devised by Woody Zuill where the whole team continuously work together over a single product and consider all aspects of the development approach from coding, user experience, testing, deploying and even documenting.

The approach is very simple, in that, there is only one machine, two keyboards, two mice and a huge amount of screen real estate to share between the whole team who sit together and work to refine the product. The story goes that initially a team that Woody was working with experienced a production issue and so like most organisations they got all of the necessary people together in a room and hooked up a machine to try to figure out where the problem was and how to fix it. As the day went on they resolved the problem in their triage or war room, (apparently they had to change rooms every so often when other people had it booked,) and generated a lot of momentum through close collaboration with each other. At the end of the day, one of the participants asked the team if they would like to work this way all of the time, and this then paved the way for Mob Programming.

One Driver & Multiple Navigators

The person with the keyboard is termed as the driver and takes direction from the rest of the team

See Also

• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Pair Programming

References

• Mob Programming: A Whole Team Approach, Zuill W, Meadows K, 2016
• A Day of Mob Programming 2016, youtube.com, accessed 22 December 2016