obeka

The person typing should not be driving. It's a bit hard to get to that point and we fail it a lot of times, but as a general rule the person sitting at the keyboard tries not to drive.

Also, if you are not the person currently at the keyboard, you are not allowed to just take over. We used strict time boxes at first to make sure that this didn't happen, these days we are a bit more relaxed since it isn't really an issue anymore.

Hi guys, one of the authors here. Wow, the interest was a lot higher than we expected

Since you all have been asking, here's a negative excerpt from an earlier version of this post, which unfortunately got cut before the final draft. I'm starting to feel like we should write a follow up post now, but in the mean time, here's this:

"It was not all positive. Finding a smooth way of working took a long time, and we lost team members along the way, presumably at least partly because they did not enjoy this. Personality differences became painfully obvious, and a lot of time was spent talking openly and honestly to each other on how to stop rubbing each other the wrong way.

Taking on new people is both easier and harder in this setting. The bonus is that they will come up to speed with the work a lot sooner. The drawback is that you have to redo the personality resolution dance before work will run smoothly again."

My take on the introvert/extrovert thing:

I'm definitely one of the extroverts on the team (even though I, like introverts, get completely exhausted by too much interaction). I thrive in a communicative environment. We have a pretty fair mix of people on the team, and we've spent some time trying to find the balance of that, leaving room for people to leave the mob when needed etc. We usually do not mob for eight hours a day - reality hits, someone comes in early, someone likes to work late, we attend meetings, we are all parents and sometimes have to work from home, and we try to encourage each other to leave the mob at times. My guess is that we mob approximately 70% of the time. My impression is that our introverts, while finding it tiresome, are a lot more expressive and take up more social space in the group than before. The extroverts have worked hard on stepping back and leaving space. We still have ways to go, but we're getting there.

We are just one team in an organization of many teams working on different parts and features of the same system. We do not feel that we need to understand 100% of everything all the time, but our general knowledge has most definitely improved, and rapidly so. We all feel more comfortable around our own components than before.

(Author here) To be fair, we are very rarely mobbing eight hours a day. Some of us come in earlier, some leave later, and you are always free to step out of the mob and go sit for yourself (even though we have been a bit bad actually doing that). I would say that we are effectively mobbing perhaps five hours each day, and the rest is spent thinking on your own, reading up on stuff, doing your own code experiments (bringing good results back into the mob) and doing all the other stuff you need to do in a day.

(Author here) We do round robin for keyboard input, but a lot more often than that. We try to switch a couple of times each hour.

We do not have a particular person driving the discussion though, I do not see that that would help us in any particular way.

(Author here) The team in this post was six when we started, four now (five if you count our coach who's actually worming himself into the mob now ;) ).

I would definitely not do this with 20. Then again I really wouldn't want to work in a team of 20 no matter the method.