A year of mob programming, part 1: metaphors

I've been practicing remote mob programming in my team for more than a year, writing more than 90% of production code inside a video call with multiple developers looking at the same screen.

A bit of context

I work in the scientific publishing domain, on web applications oriented to help scientists throughout their day.

My current team has been formed from the start as a remote team, and has been working with mob programming for more than a year. It is a cross-functional team that is including a product manager and often a designer into the (virtual room) for co-creation.

Our set of technologies includes TypeScript, lots of semantic HTML, and minimal client-side JavaScript. Container-based infrastructure and databases are pulled in as required by the evolution of the product.

This is an experience report, not advice that can be applied blindly to your team or organization.

Metaphorical definitions

All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer -- Woody Zuill

Like pair programming, mob programming can be simplistically explained through the metaphor of driving a car in a rally. Or at least, that's how I always understood the driver and navigator pair.

• A driver shares their screen and has sole access to the keyboard. They are an intelligent IDE capable of executing mechanical refactoring and fixes, but not of deciding a design direction for the code.
• A navigator verbalizes what the driver should be doing, making decisions that reach down to what test or line of code to write.
• The rest of the group is on the back seat of the car, and can speak at will, volunteering information to the navigator or answering questions. Are we there yet?
  

The roles of driver and navigator are rotated often, in fixed time or scope increments such as on every commit. The navigator can implicitly move continuously from one person to another, as long as there isn't more than one navigator at once.

Mob as a name

Speaking Italian as a first language, the term mob doesn't necessarily evoke an emotional reaction from me. But I can recognize a term that can be used to describe organized crime might not allow team members to feel comfortable. My understanding is that mob has to be intended as crowd rather than mafia.

"This is so wasteful. Why aren't they all in separate rooms playing 4 different songs?"

Nevertheless, we looked for more metaphors and terms that can be used to talk about the group of people that work together:

• orchestra emphasizes the coordination required by a group of people, and their simultaneous presence. I'm not sure they need a conductor though.
• ensemble is a similar musical metaphor, that focuses on a small group of complementary roles closely working together.
• swarm refers to a group of bees all converging towards a single task to get it done.
• the team itself ideally coincides with the mob, though there can be non-technical roles that find difficult to contribute all the time; the mob can also be temporarily reduced from the full set of developers in the team, or multiple mobs can appear in a relatively large team.
• a womble is a fictional furry creature from children's books that helps the environment by cleaning up rubbish. It has no relation to groups whatsoever and is an unrelated word, with no unfortunate or fortunate connotations attached. We ended up using this word for a while for disambiguation.

These are all the metaphors that I've seen used to describe mobbing. Stay tuned for the next part of this post, Collective Code Ownership.

Image by Princess Ruto.