After a talk on mob testing and programming, someone approached me with a question.
"I'm working with big banks. They would never allow a group to work this way. Is there anything you have to say to this?"
Let's first clarify. It's really not my business to say if you should or should not mob. What I do is sharing that against all my personal beliefs, it has been a great experience for me. I would not have had the great experience without doing a thing I did not believe in. Go read back my blog on my doubts, how I felt it's the programmer's conspiracy to make testers vanish, and how I later learned that where I was different was more valuable in a timely manner in a mob.
But the problem with big banks as such is that there are people who are probably not willing to give this a chance. Most likely you're even a contractor, and proposing this adds another layer: how about you pay us for five people doing the "work of one person". Except it isn't work of one person. It's the five people's work done in small pieces so that whatever comes out in the end does not need to be rewritten immediately and then again in a few months.
Here's a story I shared. I once got a chance to see a bank in distress, they had production problems and were suffering big time. The software was already in production. And as there was a crisis, they did what any smart organization does: they brought together the right people, and instead of letting them work separately, they put them all on the same problem, into the same room. The main difference to mobbing was that they did not really try to work on one computer. But a lot of times, solving the most pressing problem, that is exactly what they ended up doing.
For the crisis time, it was a non-issue financially to bring together 15 people to solve the crisis, using long hours. But as soon as the crisis was solved, they again dismantled their most effective way of developing. The production problems were a big hit for reputation as well as financially. I bet the teams could have spent some time on working tightly together before the problem surfaced. But at that time, it did not feel necessary because wishful thinking is strong.
We keep believing we can do the same or good work individually one by one. But learning and building on each other tends to be important in software development.
Sure, I love showing the lists of all the bugs developers missed. The project managers don't love me for showing that too late. If likes of me could use a mechanism like mobbing to change this dynamic, wouldn't that be awesome?
"I'm working with big banks. They would never allow a group to work this way. Is there anything you have to say to this?"
Let's first clarify. It's really not my business to say if you should or should not mob. What I do is sharing that against all my personal beliefs, it has been a great experience for me. I would not have had the great experience without doing a thing I did not believe in. Go read back my blog on my doubts, how I felt it's the programmer's conspiracy to make testers vanish, and how I later learned that where I was different was more valuable in a timely manner in a mob.
But the problem with big banks as such is that there are people who are probably not willing to give this a chance. Most likely you're even a contractor, and proposing this adds another layer: how about you pay us for five people doing the "work of one person". Except it isn't work of one person. It's the five people's work done in small pieces so that whatever comes out in the end does not need to be rewritten immediately and then again in a few months.
Here's a story I shared. I once got a chance to see a bank in distress, they had production problems and were suffering big time. The software was already in production. And as there was a crisis, they did what any smart organization does: they brought together the right people, and instead of letting them work separately, they put them all on the same problem, into the same room. The main difference to mobbing was that they did not really try to work on one computer. But a lot of times, solving the most pressing problem, that is exactly what they ended up doing.
For the crisis time, it was a non-issue financially to bring together 15 people to solve the crisis, using long hours. But as soon as the crisis was solved, they again dismantled their most effective way of developing. The production problems were a big hit for reputation as well as financially. I bet the teams could have spent some time on working tightly together before the problem surfaced. But at that time, it did not feel necessary because wishful thinking is strong.
We keep believing we can do the same or good work individually one by one. But learning and building on each other tends to be important in software development.
Sure, I love showing the lists of all the bugs developers missed. The project managers don't love me for showing that too late. If likes of me could use a mechanism like mobbing to change this dynamic, wouldn't that be awesome?
