FWIW, the justification is interesting. From https://thecuriousdeveloper.com/2013/09/15/get-a-good-start-with-mob-programming/ https://thecuriousdeveloper.com/2

FWIW, the justification is interesting. From https://thecuriousdeveloper.com/2013/09/15/get-a-good-start-with-mob-programming/ https://thecuriousdeveloper.com/2013/09/15/get-a-good-start-... --- Why we tried it When asked to implement a rather big task, like an epic, you’re often in a state where you have a pretty good picture of what needs to be done on high level, but on a lower level it can be very fluffy and unclear. Fluffy enough to stand in the way of being able to ”slice the cake” in nice, independent, deliverable user stories. Fluffy enough to give us problems if our aim is to have a structured, ordinary sprint backlog prepared, and to burn that backlog down continuously by developing small software increments for a couple of weeks. You know you’re in that fluffy state when: - Someone asks where a good place to start this epic is and all possible ways you can think of are either intertwined and far from independent steps or just one big mega user story - You get a urge to just start coding, hack away for a while and see where you end up - You may even wish that you, for a while at least, could forget everything related to user stories, epics, backlogs and burn downs and just do some Programming, Motherfucker http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/ --- Now, if this technique can supposedly solve that critical problem -- and it is critical; I spend >N% of my time in that sate -- we should give it the benefit of the doubt and just try it. It sounds like the point is to spend a couple hours in an environment where forward progress is always being made every minute, yet freedom has been completely removed. I think I'd volunteer for that, to be honest. It's so nice working from a designer's mockup rather than trying to design + build the whole app simultaneously. That same feeling might apply here. It's kind of compelling. But only if everyone actually wants to do it. Think of how much time we've all wasted fiddling around with design, moving property lists around, exploring new approaches, or throwing in an hour of metaprogramming only to find out it reduced our line count from 150 to 100 and made it quite a lot harder to read. If you tried to pull any of that during one of these sessions, you'd get called out immediately. Oh yeah: http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hired-a-girl-on-craigslist-to-slap-me-in-the-face-and-why-it-quadrupled-my-productivity/ http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hired-a-girl-on-craigsli... You know, this really should be a thing. I wonder if devs would pay for this? I'd give someone $20/hr to keep me on track. But they'd need to know enough about programming not to be annoying or blatantly mistaken.