This is an experience report from our team, who first dabbled with mob programming two years ago; since then we have adopted it as part of our core culture, and continue to spread it throughout our organization and clients. We talk a bit about who inspired us, how we convinced our leaders to let us try it, and where we ended up. We also show some of the data we collected along the way, and talk about the advantages we’ve seen, the challenges we’ve encountered, and some of the ways we’ve adapted.

If you’re a manager, or otherwise accountable for software development and support budgets, you may have heard developers talking about wanting to go “serverless” on some new work. There’s a lot of chat about AWS and Azure and functions and lambdas and it just sounds like the latest shiny thing, bored programmers wanting to play with new toys. Your first instinct might be that they should just get on with their work, using the tried and true and trusted servers you already have in place, with their well-understood costs and support needs.

A while back I read a great article that outlines both the challenges and advantages of getting all necessary parties involved in a project early, including developers and other “tech” people. The content resonated with me, since my team was in the midst of this exact situation — we had started to participate in the “initiation” phase of projects. I am a software engineer and most of my team are also software engineers, my viewpoint here is getting people like us involved early.