This weekend marked the 10th anniversary of Cucumber's first release, and we decided to celebrate with an open invitation to our community to join a mob programming session.
This experience report was written by Sal Freudenberg and Matt Wynne, first published on the Agile Alliance site after XP 2018 in Porto.
Mob-programming is a young practice, only starting to be embraced by agile teams. Remote mob programming even more so; it is rarely practiced and so far only poorly understood. This experience report describes the way the Cucumber team, who are fully remote, practice mob programming and the surprising benefits we have discovered.
The Cucumber Pro product team has been practicing mob programming for almost two years now. We’ve had periods where we drifted back to working in pairs, but for the last nine months mobbing has explicitly been our default behaviour as a team.
I think we’ve learned a lot from that, and I want to share some patterns I’ve noticed. As you read these thoughts, you should be aware that our mob is almost exclusively remote. We do meet up about once a month, but we tend to spend that time around a whiteboard rather than a keyboard.