Mob programming in short

Yesterday our team was eagerly waiting for our team coach to make his appearance at Agila Sverige an agile conference in Sweden.

You can watch his awesome talk here (in Swedish).

As we were waiting we watched an other lightning talk about tips for visualizations in agile projects doing Scrum/Kanban. By the way this talk had awesome tips for visualizations and the presenter did a really great job. You can watch it here (also in Swedish).

But during the talk members of our team were twitching and every now and then someone said

-“We’ve Done that”

-“We’ve tried that”

To summarize I think we all collectively realized how much waste we’ve gotten rid of during the past 6 months we’ve been mob programming. It’s almost like the first time you tried Kanban after doing Scrum and realized there was a lot of waste in Scrum that you were glad to get rid of.

So about 6 months ago our team at Fritidsresor began doing mob programming and my initial concerns were about speed. Would be able to sustain the same speed or even deliver faster.

I was dead wrong, speed is just one of the thing that gets more awesome. You will eliminate a lot of waste and gain both speed, quality and most important of all your team will get really tight and have lot’s of fun.

I’m out of battery so here are my top 5 tips for a successful introduction:

1. Trust, make sure that everybody is on board. All members of the team, your team coach and the organization. The organization part is really hard I think, luckily for us our team work at Fritidsresor where they’re really open for this kind of experiments.

2. Start small, begin with 1 hour a day or half a day every week. Working your way up to full days.

3. Humbleness, you’ll work closer to your team members that you can imagine. It will take some time before the team process is in place, but on the other hand with mob programming you will get to that place faster.

4. Territory, you will need a physical place were you can use a projector (or two). Were you can invite stakeholders and so forth.

5. Software, you will need some kind of timer that interrupts team members when their time is up. You will need a team account for computer login, email, chat, GitHub etc.

This and more are stuff we’re glad to share as a team in fact we’re doing a presentation today at 15.00 at Valtech Tech Day 2015.

Cheers,

Hugo