Leveraging the Mob Mentality: An Experience Report on Mob Programming

• Main Authors: Buchan, Jim, Pearl, Mark
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 26-07-2019
• Subjects: Computer Science - Software Engineering
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1907.11352

In EASE'18 Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on
Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 2018 Vol. Part F137700 (pp.
199-204) Mob Programming, or "mobbing", is a relatively new collaborative programming
practice being experimented with in different organizational contexts. There
are a number of claimed benefits to this way of working, but it is not clear if
these are realized in practice and under what circumstances. This paper
describes the experience of one team's experiences experimenting with Mob
Programming over an 18-month period. The context is programming in a software
product organization in the Financial Services sector. The paper details the
benefits and challenges observed as well as lessons learned from these
experiences. It also reports some early work on understanding others'
experiences and perceptions of mobbing through a preliminary international
survey of 82 practitioners of Mob Programming. The findings from the case and
the survey generally align well, as well as suggesting several fruitful areas
for further research into Mob Programming. Practitioners should find this
useful to extract learnings to inform their own mobbing experiments and its
potential impact on collaborative software development.