Mob Programming Retrospectives


One nice thing with mobbing is that it’s easy to have meetings. The team wanted a retrospective yesterday, so we all moved to a room and had a quick meeting.

We used a Lean Coffee format last time. This time we tried a Sail-Anchor format (what blows us forwards, what drags us back). 

There were two main groups for each. 

What pushes us forwards:
  • Behaviour in the mob.
  • Good coding practices.
Socialising more has increased morale. The mob in general seems more cohesive. Dropping in and out has become more normal. 

For coding practices, we’ve been focussing on small well-defined tasks, small simple functions, and writing good Scenarios. 

What drags us back:
  • Behaviour in the mob.
  • The codebase and tools.
The unhelpful behaviour was a mix of not following good mob practices, criticising code written by others, and meandering off course down rabbit holes in the code. 

To help, we agreed that we’d check if a rabbit hole was worth following at the end of each turn driving. And anyone can raise their hand to ask for silence if they spot us behaving badly. 

For the codebase and the tools, we just have to keep learning. 

All in half an hour :-)

We’ll have another one in the next couple of weeks. 

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