Great content! I see that accumulated technical debt such as outdated technologies, low quality code, lack of testing and incomplete documentation can slow down development and increase time spent on maintenance as well.
Pair programming is definitely useful when working on a complex problem! However I found that using pair programming for every story can be very taxing, especially for us neurodivergent devs:
>Both Pair and Mob programming come with a lot of social aspects. We are socializing all day. Human beings are social creatures.
Socializing can be exhausting for certain people!
I have pair programmed a lot in the past and I found that for every hour of pair programming I need at least an hour of recovery time, which is time spent alone reading and unwinding and not even working on another problem. I’ve also been in a situation where I had to pair program all day remotely and this started to burn me out fast.
I find that a lot of discussion on pair and mob programming focuses on all the positives and completely skips over the negatives which are particularly negative for neurodivergent devs but also apply to more introverted devs (which is a lot of them).
Pair programming is a really useful process when tackling more complex issues, or can be applied when one of the devs is stuck; but I am very skeptical of applying it to all development all the time as that’s honestly completely disregarding the needs and limitations of individual developers when it comes to the energy cost of intensive cooperation and social interaction.
>All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer
All being brilliant in a team imposible to create such team in first place.
May be Mob is the way to uplift all to x level of brillence over a period of mobbing.
Great content! I see that accumulated technical debt such as outdated technologies, low quality code, lack of testing and incomplete documentation can slow down development and increase time spent on maintenance as well.
Pair programming is definitely useful when working on a complex problem! However I found that using pair programming for every story can be very taxing, especially for us neurodivergent devs:
>Both Pair and Mob programming come with a lot of social aspects. We are socializing all day. Human beings are social creatures.
Socializing can be exhausting for certain people!
I have pair programmed a lot in the past and I found that for every hour of pair programming I need at least an hour of recovery time, which is time spent alone reading and unwinding and not even working on another problem. I’ve also been in a situation where I had to pair program all day remotely and this started to burn me out fast.
I find that a lot of discussion on pair and mob programming focuses on all the positives and completely skips over the negatives which are particularly negative for neurodivergent devs but also apply to more introverted devs (which is a lot of them).
Pair programming is a really useful process when tackling more complex issues, or can be applied when one of the devs is stuck; but I am very skeptical of applying it to all development all the time as that’s honestly completely disregarding the needs and limitations of individual developers when it comes to the energy cost of intensive cooperation and social interaction.