Mob Programming

Two day workshop
Woody Zuill

Mob Programming

No dates are scheduled for this workshop. Let us know if you think we should organize it near you, or if you'd like to book it on premise in your organisation.


Mob Programming: All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same place, and on the same computer.

Mob Programming is a cost-effective, collaborative and fun way to get work done together. It's a whole-team approach to development, where coding, designing, testing, and working with the "customer" (partner, Product Owner, User, etc.) is all done as a team.

Participants in this workshop experience a day of learning and doing Mob Programming. We cover the mechanics of how to work together as a Mob as well as the techniques that make this form of development so effective.

We’ll learn how a Mob performs sample project work, including user stories, prioritization, test-driven development, refactoring, and retrospectives.

Designed and facilitated by Mob Programming pioneer Woody Zuill, this workshop provides a hands-on education in the art of mobbing and it's significant benefits for your teams.

Learning Goals

  • How 5+ people can be effective working on just one thing
  • Heuristics for team size
  • Guidelines for successful collaboration
  • Handling competing solutions and ideas to a coding problem
  • Encouraging politeness and kindness of team members
  • Reducing or eliminating harmful conflicts
  • Mobbing Mechanics
  • Tools for team coding
  • Workspace setup
  • How to "Amplify Learning" and take advantage of continual learning opportunities
  • "Real-time" and continuous Retrospectives to reflect, tune, adjust
  • The theory of why Mob Programming is effective.
  • Test-Driven Development (TDD) as a team
  • Working with Product Owners, Business Experts, Testers, Designers as part of the team
  • Refactoring as a team
  • Continuous feedback at all levels of granularity

Workshop Agenda

  • Hands-on Exercises, Presentation, Interactive Dialogues, Simulations, Videos
  • Introduction: Mob Programming Introduction, The basics of how it works
  • Activity: The nature of software development
  • Activity: Teamwork - a good thing
  • Driver/Navigator teamwork Roles and Techniques
  • Coding Dojo Demonstration: A simple demo of Mob Programming with volunteers from the participants.
  • Advanced Mob Programming Concepts - Hands on coding
  • Coding Exercise: Working on a Sample Project, learning to work together using a few rules
  • Amplified Learning, How to take advantage of learning opportunities
  • Continuing the Coding Exercise: Removing the rules
  • Retrospective and review, group discussion of what we’ve learned
Woody Zuill

About Woody Zuill

Woody Zuill has been programming computers for 30+ years, and works as an Agile Coach and Application Development Manager. He and his team are the originators of the Mob Programming approach to teamwork in software development and he is considered one of the founders of the "#NoEstimates" discussion.

He believes that code must be simple, clean, and maintainable so that we can realize the Agile promise of Responding to Change, and that we must constantly "Inspect and Adapt". He has a passion taking code that is hard to maintain and cleaning, refactoring, and bringing it back into a healthy state.

All workshops by Woody Zuill

No dates are scheduled for this workshop. Let us know if you think we should organize it near you, or if you'd like to book it on premise in your organisation.


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