HA HA! Author here.

Our team name is "The Borg"

Hey! One of the authors here.

I really wish we had hard data on this. But we did not have reliable metrics in place before. I would however argue that there isn't data the other way either ;)

But in lack of hard data, I can say what our gut feeling is. We started with mob programming because we felt we had a total inability to deliver anything (lots of half done work), and now we feel like we are delivery frequently with high quality.

> we felt we had a total inability to deliver anything (lots of half done work)

While I can sympathise with this, I do believe that this is mainly a problem with management. In order for a group to be productive there needs to be a single mind calling the big shots, in your case you offloaded this responsibility to a mob, usually this is the job of a product lead/project manager.

Hey! One of the authors here. I will do my best to provide some responses, but it's kind of late here.

- I find it weird they didn't really point out any down-sides, possibly because it's a corporate blog and marketing wouldn't let them.

Not at all the case, we had some bad but felt the post was kind of long so they ended up edit out. No one but us reviewed the post first ;) Actually didn't even really notice all the negatives were gone until it was mentioned...

Here is the negatives we edited: " It was not all positive. Finding a smooth way of working took a long time, and we lost team members along the way, presumably at least partly because they did not enjoy this. Personality differences became painfully obvious, and a lot of time was spent talking openly and honestly to each other on how to stop rubbing each other the wrong way.

Taking on new people is both easier and harder in this setting. The bonus is that they will come up to speed with the work a lot sooner. The drawback is that you have to redo the personality resolution dance before work will run smoothly again. "

- No time to think. I find I solve solutions by thinking about them, and I can imagine mob rule would lend itself to less thinking and more doing (fastest solution that sounds half-right gets done first). Similarly…

This was actually a focus of a retrospective today, and we do see this happening sometimes. We agreed today to try to be more aware of it, and for people to speak up when they feel it is happening.

- Biggest personality wins. I'd worry that whoever had the largest personality would drive everything, leading to people being disengaged. Especially when it comes to engineering / structural decisions, if that person thinks they know whats best you're not going to have the chance to try something (and maybe fail) and grow as a developer

This was only the case for the first few weeks, then as we point out in the article: "Interpersonal issues and friction had to be resolved. When interpersonal issues happened they get brought up much more quickly. In a ”normal team” when there are these types of interpersonal issues they are often allowed to fester. People who have issues only need to deal with each other for limited periods of time, so they just grin and bear it. This isn’t really possible inside of the mob because you would go completely insane."

So this ended up being actually the opposite effect in the long term, dominant personalities were addressed and we all grew as a result.

- No personal space. You know, maybe it's because I work from home, but sometimes my fiancee messages me a video of a cat being cute, and I might just take 2 minutes off working to watch it, because I'm a human being and not a sack of watery meat sacrificed to the gestalt. I could imagine it would be very awkward to do anything at work that wasn't explicitly working, which sounds pretty suffocating to me.

This is indeed something we struggle with, and we bring it up a lot. People are allowed to leave the mob as often as they choose, but sometimes it feels like there is a social pressure to stay. All I can say is we try to be aware of it, and one of our working agreements is to "remind each other it's OK to leave the mob"

- Constantly bringing people up to speed. Maybe this is actually a good thing? IDK, but I think if some people are faster than others, or people wander off to make a coffee or whatever, or come in at different times, or leave at different times, you may spend a lot of time going over the same decisions and working through the same problem spaces over and over again. This could be a good thing, or it could be OK that some people know about component X and some know about component Y and there is little overlap.

Not sure I follow this one :P

- If anyone from Meltwater is reading this I'd be interested to know if you had any problems (these ones or other), because it sounds like-- ignoring the first month-- this plan has no flaws. Which seems hard to believe.

It's definitely not been all smiles and roses, and we have struggles like any team, but we also all agree that this has been an amazing experience and well worth any negative effects we've seen.

Hey Zebra, thanks for the replies, IMO you should edit your blog post (or link to your comment here) because that's a really helpful set of counter experiences that make your blog post feel much more genuine, compelling and relatable.

>> Constantly bringing people up to speed… > Not sure I follow this one :P

The point came from (as did all of them really) past experiences of mine. I've found it can be incredibly painful and time-consuming to expect 100% of people to understand 100% of situations. A few years and companies ago we got to the point where there was an entire day of planning for a 2 week sprint, due to this requirement for total understanding. It was not an enjoyable experience, and I still don't believe it was a worthwhile tradeoff.

I believe everyone should understand the whole project at a high level. However, I'm very comfortable with only understanding a portion of the software or features being currently developed at the deep level required to work on them at that instant. I'm happy to let go and trust that the people who do understand will do a good job without my input. I can always learn about it later if I have to, because while I don't have to know about everything, I also don't just know about anything (ie never completely silo).

But: I'm willing to accept that this is my impatience at play, and that everything would be better off if everyone understood everything. It's just been historically (for me) been a very large price to pay.

obeka is going to post the negatives in the comments.

I think the main point about "Constantly bringing people up to speed" is that this now happens without overhead, just sort of naturally, to the point that we don't even notice it.