"Mob programming for research"

[metazool]

Initial draft overview of mob programming for research, based on experiences of how it's worked in past practise.

I'm happy to expand any parts that are too brief, or overviewy, and it's a bit opinionated!

Part of #29

[mattjbr123]

Thanks for this @metazool I'm intrigued by the concept!

I think I'm still struggling a little to work out what mob programming actually 'is' or maybe more specifically what 'counts' as mob programming? Do you have any examples you could put in? (my brain works well with examples!!)
More specifically still I'm struggling to get my head around the 'driver' and 'navigator' roles. Do these roles do any actual programming, or do they exist more to guide the programmers as to where to code and the context (but explicitly not make any coding decisions)? Perhaps some more info on those roles in the 'formally, these are the rules' section would help me?
(nb, these are just suggestions!).

The link to the Recurse Center social rules was really nice, they do a great job of articulating things and giving good examples. Definitely something to aspire to!
I also appreciated the emphasis given to explaining that although it feels slow it speeds you up in other areas, that makes a lot of sense to me, and being used to solo programming the "but it's slowwww" excuse definitely would have been my first reaction!

Hope that was a vaguely helpful review!

[jmarshrossney]

I mean I really enjoyed reading this - took 2 minutes and I learned something which is ususual for me!

I don't have any suggestions to modify this document, but maybe a thought for down the line: we could make a short blog post, perhaps starting with this brief introduction, that takes the reader through a mob programming session (could be one of our plankton ones). The target audience would be scientists at UKCEH or elsewhere working on some shared code (e.g. an analysis script). We could describe our setup, our roles, what we actually did (some screenshots and quotes from e.g. a Teams transcript) and some 'things we learned' about what went well and what pitfalls to avoid. Make it short and easy to read and it might be the kind of thing that just gets shared in a quick meeting as a "wanna try this tomorrow afternoon" kind of thing.

[longr]

This looks good. Is the target audiance RSEs? people doing RSE work, or Researchers in general? I have made some comments, although never done it this was before so hopefully it turns out readable.

[metazool]

Thank you for the incredibly detailed review @longr and for the suggested improvements @mattjbr123 - I've added a set of commits to address them

[metazool]

@mattjbr123 could i trouble you for an Approve on this now comments are addressed? I'm spending a chunk of today stocktaking of this repo, write more bridging material and add some publishing pipelines, as a displacement activity from actually working on the RSECon talk for next week...

resolved

[mattjbr123]

Thanks for writing this @metazool
I'd like to come along to one of the mob prog sessions you and @albags run sometime, to really get a feel for it

[longr]

Thanks for writing this up @metazool . Happy with it, and like @mattjbr123 I would be interested in coming to one at some point to see how they work in practise.