Mobprogramming all the time?

One of the first questions that I get when I say that our team does Software Teaming full time is around it being really, all the time.

I’d like to take you through an average day for an imaginary team.

One team member is more of an early bird than the others and starts his day at 8.

He probably starts the day with the usual catch up on Slack, look at the agenda for the day, look at what happened in the code yesterday. After a while he’ll ease into some programming and continue the work from the day before.

When time approaches 9, the two other team members start their work day and go through the same morning routine. When they feel ready to mob, they join up on the mob machine and start a huddle in Slack.

For two hours, the full team works in rotation (with breaks!) until 11 when one team member has her gym session and takes advantage of the wellness hours that the company provides. The two others carry on for a bit until they feel too peckish to continue.

After lunch there is a meeting to discuss the long term plans for the application that the team is working with. They join their Product Manager and some power users and talk about the big picture. Miro is probably used as a collaboration tools where everyone can provide their input.

After the meeting and a break, the team regroups on the mob machine and notice that during the meeting some support issue has been reported in Slack. They decide to solve it right away and spend 30 minutes looking into it together.

It’s around 15, and one of the team members drops out for his biweekly 1-1 with his manager. The other two go back to working on the feature that the team is currently building. Our early bird has to pick up the kids and drops out at 16 as our other team member returns from his 1-1. At this point, with tired brains, the remaining team members decide to pick out some easier things to do. Asking some questions in Slack to get some answers which will be helpful to have for the next part of the feature, complete some todos in the code, etc.

When they decide that that’s it for the day, they ask themselves if anything happened in the last hours that they should report so that when the first team member start in the morning, they know where to pick up. Int his case, the small commits feel self explanatory and they log out for the day.

As you can tell, the time spent when all the team members are working together does not correspond to the full work day. It doesn’t have to be either. There are many more occasions when individuals have their own shedules: when their work day starts and ends, book clubs, 1-1s, private appointments, a cross team project that they are a part of, being a part time manager, etc… The idea with Software Teaming is that the default for the work that is done in the team is to do it together. The bulk of the work is done in the mob and that is enough for the team to knowledge share and to set their principles in a way which makes the individual work moments reflect the spirit own the team.