Meetup med Woody: Mob Programming and the Power of Flow

Kantega is happy to announce a meetup with Woody Zuill, a pioneer of the Mob Programming approach to teamwork in software development. Woody Zuill is coming to Norway to hold a full day workshop. In addition, we've managed to arrange this free evening meetup with Woody in cooperation with OSWA.

There will be pizza at Kantega's offices at Kirkegata 5 from 17:30. The talk will start 18.00. We have limited space at this meetup! The meetup will be in English.

Abstract:
"How can you possibly be productive with 5 people working at one computer?"

This is frequently the first question someone will ask when they first hear about Mob Programming. With Mob Programming 4 or 5 or more people work together at one computer to create software. It seems preposterous, but it's worked well for us, and for many teams. But how can this possibly work?!

Well… I don't propose that I know the answer, but I have a few ideas - and one of the most compelling to me is the idea of flow. There are several common uses of the word, and in software development we hear people talk about being "in the zone", where there is an intense focus that leads to a highly productive state where the sense of time disappears and we experience a sense of ecstasy and clarity. But there is another use of the work "flow" in the world of Lean Manufacturing and Lean Product Development. In this context by flow we mean the direct completion of work from start to finish with as little wasted time and inventory as possible.

I'll attempt to show how these two seemingly unrelated types of flow come into play when we work as a Mob Programming team. Preposterous? Perhaps, but it's worth considering the possibilities.

Bio - Woody Zuill:
I’ve been programming computers for over 30 years, and I'm currently the Agile Coach for a development team - the "Mob". For the past 15+ years I've worked continuously as an Agile Coach and/or developer in both large and small environments, and have trained over 20 teams and 200+ developers in Agile practices. I believe code must be simple, clean, testable, and maintainable so we can respond to change while quickly delivering working software. I have a passion for bringing unmaintainable code back into a manageable, healthy state.