Episode 144: Mob Programming & #noestimates with Woody Zuill

Craig is at Agile 2016 in Atlanta and catches up with his old friend Woody Zuill to talk about Mob Programming and #noestimates

Craig’s InfoQ interview with Woody Zuill
We need to work well together to get our work done
Mob Programming originated at Hunter Industries, identified we can get a lot done if we don’t have to wait for answers to questions from other people and if we are all in the same context all the time
Mob Programming – all the people on the team working at the same time, working in the same space on the same thing and using a single computer and working interactively the entire day
Work well together and turn up the good, need to pay attention on how to work well together
“Extreme Programming Explained” by Kent Beck – “a great book”
The person with the idea expresses it out loud, somebody else enters it via the keyboard
Original Mob Programming at Hunter Industries video and the Updated Mob Programming at Hunter Industries video showing 6 teams working in 6 minutes
When you are getting results quicker with good quality, nobody can really question your way of working
How can people be productive when we separate the people who should be working together?
Mob Programming website
“Mob Programming: A Whole Team Approach” book with Kevin Meadows
#noestimates – we do estimates with little validation that they are useful to us, we should question the practices we do automatically, by default or not questioning, what is the purpose for the estimates and how well are they serving us
Need to look for work that is broken down enough to something of value that we can deliver to a customer
We need to experiment more rather than trudging through mud that is getting deeper, improve small things to get a big gain
Vasco Duarte article “Story Points Considered Harmful – Or why the future of estimation is really in our past…“