Working together

Once there where two kids next to each other, playing with toy cars in a sandbox. Their parents were in joy because they saw their kids playing together. But where they? The kids played with their own toys in their own patch of sand. They didn't play together, they just played next to each other.

A couple of years later, the kids sat in the sandbox again, but this time they shared their toy cars and build a road in the sandbox. Now they just didn't sit together, they were actually playing together and had a lot of fun.

Most teams work together as the little kids in the story, they don't actually work together, they just happen to be in the same team. They pull their work individually from the worklog. They are just individuals sharing a desk space. Each morning during standup they tell each other what they did, and no one has a clue about what it exactly is they have done or they don't care. 

Some engineers put their name on a couple of items to claim them as future work. When they have one item done, they move on to the next. Others finish their work and pull stuff from the backlog into the sprint because there are no free items to work on. See where this is going? Not everything the team committed to is done but extra stuff is delivered as well. This doesn't fall well with stakeholders.

What can we do about it? First of all no team member can have more than one story on their name. Second, in the daily scrum we talk about the work that is on the scrum board. From top right: the stuff that is almost done, to bottom left: the stuff that still needs to be done. We ask ourselves: "What can we do today to finish this story". Then we ask if anyone wants to help finish it, together. As we progress through the stories in the end we run out of engineers.

So now we have at least two engineers on one story. We need something to enable us to work together. The idea is that everybody participates in fixing the story. We use pair or mob programming to accomplish this.

With pair programming there is a single driver behind a computer and there is one or more navigator who sit close to the driver. The driver is just inputting in the computer, they put in their implementation. The navigator(s) talk about the problem and try finding a solution. Every once in a while the driver switches with a navigator.

When we use this setting we can skip peer review, we are peering the whole time, so there's no use for that. Because more brains have worked out the solution it is of better quality which result in less incidents. And most importantly we shared knowledge and learned from each other. 

Below are a couple of resources to have a look at, the first is Stacy who talks about pair programming, the second is an article about mob programming on medium.

Stacy Cashmore: How to really work together as a team

Sam Fare: I did mob programming every day for 5 months.