A colleague of mine recently as asked me to distill my ‘mob programming guidelines’ into shorter chunks of information. Also to make and make it start with 2 people, for a ramp up for pair to mobbing over time as a team desires.

This process has been defined as ‘Strong Style’ Pair Programming.

In this style of pairing, all logic gets vetted by two brilliant minds as it is developed.

Benefits of Strong Style Pairing

• Two Heads are better then one.
• Velocity will not suffer if a team member leaves.
• Rapid mutual education of paring partners.
• Less Errors get committed.
• All participants are full engaged at all times.

Two roles of strong style pairing

Navigator: The person dictating and the the most focused on the big picture logic. They will be hands free or have a machine open for research purposes.

Driver: The person at the keyboard. They focus on the micro goals of proper syntax and cleanliness of code.

Talking Up to your pair

Intent → Technical → Dictation

When giving directions it is best to start with your intent over syntax. Drivers may have other methods of achieving the same result then the navigator. Coding in a process that they are familiar with is more efficient than having to lean the drivers methods. This also promotes the education of the Navigator of new methods.

A sentence with “In Order to, do a task, please do this” is a great starting point.

Drivers should feel free to ask how or clarification. Let them prompt for a technical hint or dictation, rather then assuming they do not know.

Ideal pair programming starter sessions.

Pair Programming can be awkward at first the bellow items are good for rapid rapport building between developers.

• Code Refactoring
• Pseudo Coding
• Unit Test writing