Guest Mobbing at Emmersion

 A few weeks ago I saw a post on Twitter, asking if anyone would like to join a team as a guest-mobber at Emmersion. Unless you're a contractor, or freelance, then it's not often you get to work with complete strangers, to see how they work, what kind of problems they face, how they solve them...

Anyway, Mike Clement got back to me, and once we'd sorted out the NDAs, we agreed on a two-hour session with one of their dev teams. The slot was right after work for me in Scotland, and early afternoon for them in the US. 

So last night, I joined a Zoom call, and we jumped straight in to solving a production problem. They had a mob of five, with me as well, and their product owner at the start.We were looking at a problem where the user could do some input, the data should be sent off to a third-party, a response received, and then the UI updated. But something was wrong, and it didn't work.

Like a lot us, they had a complex legacy system which none of them understood. It looked like they had started to use a strangler pattern, so some requests went through a new simpler system, and some went on to a monolith. 

Maybe because this was a tricky issue, where the broken link could be in many places (Was it the user input? Was the data not sent to the third party? Was the response ignored? etc) the team swarmed round the problem at first, with different people looking at different bits of code, while one person talked to me. It was maybe an hour in that they started working on code together, and even then, one person seemed to be off doing their own thing until it was their turn to drive. 

But once we had found the problem and poked around at a couple of alternative solutions, we had the problem fixed. We then immediately discovered that the bug had hidden some other bugs that were now reproducible, but it was at least a step forwards, We worked in 7-minute iterations, with no strict navigator. They weren't strict on changing over when the iteration was up either. Several times, people carried on working for a few minutes after the seven minutes was up, which I thought was interesting. On my team, we use a timer that locks the screen, so we are forced to switch when the iteration is up. 

And the final thing I noticed, especially because this was a two-hour slot right after my normal work, was that they didn't take breaks for the two hours. We take breaks every half hour normally, so this was an intense and exhausting experience for me!

Overall, though, I'm very grateful for the team at Emmersion to offer me this opportunity, and I wish them well in the future :-)

Comments

  1. Mike ClementSeptember 3, 2020 at 7:24 AM

    Thanks Barney! The team really enjoyed having you. It's great to cross-pollinate and share ideas on how to improve our mobbing practice. If anyone else out there is interested in joining us, let me know via https://bit.ly/emmersion-guest-mobber .

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