---
title: "Connecting with Mob Programming"
description: "A six-person team drawn from three teams had six weeks to complete an ambitious Shipping project, while several members were new to the domain or company and had not worked together. Pairing was uncommon, and pull requests received little substantive feedback, creating uncertainty about whether the team was growing, connecting, and learning. After Sheldon Nunes introduced mob programming, the team used a shared screen and ten-minute driver rotations, with each driver pushing changes before the next person pulled them. This kept everyone engaged, accelerated reversible decisions, limited context dumps, and made most code review back-and-forth unnecessary. Across nearly daily sessions for three months, the team reported stronger relationships, easier feedback, restored remote learning, and better support for newcomers, while identifying drawing, public discoverable calls, simple environments, cross-disciplinary participation, and breaks as important practices; tests and documentation were considered poor fits for mobbing."
---

# Connecting with Mob Programming

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · 2023-10-18 · Jul 30, 2021

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

A six-person team drawn from three teams had six weeks to complete an ambitious Shipping project, while several members were new to the domain or company and had not worked together. Pairing was uncommon, and pull requests received little substantive feedback, creating uncertainty about whether the team was growing, connecting, and learning. After Sheldon Nunes introduced mob programming, the team used a shared screen and ten-minute driver rotations, with each driver pushing changes before the next person pulled them. This kept everyone engaged, accelerated reversible decisions, limited context dumps, and made most code review back-and-forth unnecessary. Across nearly daily sessions for three months, the team reported stronger relationships, easier feedback, restored remote learning, and better support for newcomers, while identifying drawing, public discoverable calls, simple environments, cross-disciplinary participation, and breaks as important practices; tests and documentation were considered poor fits for mobbing.

## Context

A six-person team from three teams had six weeks to complete an ambitious Shipping project. Half the team was new to the Shipping domain, some members were new to the company, and most had never met or worked together. Pairing was infrequent, collaboration often stayed within existing relationships, and pull requests received little substantive feedback.

## Approach / What changed

The team adopted mob programming, with the whole group working on the same problem through a shared screen. After an ineffective initial session, they introduced ten-minute driver rotations: each driver pushed work at the end of the turn, and the next person pulled the changes. They used a simple shared branch and setup, public Slack calls for discoverability, drawing for visual communication, and time limits of about two hours.

## Takeaways

- Ten-minute driver rotations kept the whole group engaged, sped up reversible decisions, and reduced long context dumps during handoffs.
- Publicly discoverable Slack calls let people join or leave the mob and made breaks possible without putting pressure on the entire team to attend.
- Fast-rotation mobbing worked poorly for long-running tests and documentation; those tasks were better handled through pairing, individual ownership, or solo work.

**Tags:** [Developer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/topic/developer-experience), [Onboarding](https://yomu.fyi/topic/onboarding), [Remote Work](https://yomu.fyi/topic/remote-work)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/mob-programming)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/mob-programming
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-30T15:29:38.322Z

[Read original post](https://shopify.engineering/mob-programming)