From Pair Programming to Mob Programming to Mob Architecting

The real life of a developer is not about development - it is about maintenance. Today typical programmers do not develop applications from scratch but they spend their time fixing, extending, modifying and enhancing existing applications. The biggest problem in their daily work is that over time maintenance mutates from structured programming to defensive programming: The code becomes too complex to be maintained. We put in code which we know is stupid from an architectural point of view but it is the only solution that will hopefully work. Maintenance becomes more and more difficult and expensive. In this paper, I will show you how pair programming, mob programming and mob architecting help your team to avoid this apparently inevitable dead end. These three levels of quality improvement start with programming in pairs evolve to programming with the whole team (mob) and finally arrive at improving the architecture with the whole team.