In my experience, when it comes to programming productivity, mob programming beats the rest. Of course the definition of productivity in this context is debatable and these are just my observations. Thus, it is not a proper scientific study but bear with me anyway.
I wish to compare one aspect of productivity, how we work together. I look at single programming, pull requests, pair programming and mob programming.
Our goal at the Crisp hack summit last weekend was to migrate our 2 year old shopping app written in Meteor to the latest version and to learn about Google’s material design. Our old app was built as a way for us to learn Meteor. The structure is less than ideal, and as we learn new things we add them to the app, but don’t revisit old parts. So we followed Dan North’s experiment rewriting the app from scratch. We also decided to use Materialize for the UI. We wanted to rewrite the app in 2 days, keeping all the functionality we currently have, but at the same time adding the UI and usability improvements that we really need.
We ended up completing the rewrite in 9 days: 2 hack days and then a couple of hours each day for the next week. Not too bad for a brand new app, but surprisingly longer than we would have guessed. Both Meteor and Materialize are pretty simple to get started with, but adding Materialize to Meteor proved to be challenging. Here are some highlights!
Yesterday we ended our second two-week sprint and on the demo, besides showing the system, we could do some bragging about test coverage using our Sonar dashboard. We also could show Fitnesse tests at system level that implements the specification by example technique, or like some say, executable requirements.
Here is part 2, a week has past. I think as I write so it is a bit different in style and content than my other posts here.
It has been a hectic week, this first week as PO/SM. First of all, it was only four days thanks to national day. Then there were two new developers from Russia which meant twice as many developers as we had before, not counting me. Simple, you just tell people to pair program. That works out if they are well enough to come to work. Which they weren’t. So they russians were left a bit hanging. I had a lot to do just to keep the team running, at least according to my standards.
