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Joe Wright

Technical person at Arnold Clark

Joe helps people deliver software that’s well designed, fully tested and released early. He coaches teams to adopt agile engineering practices with a focus on XP, clean code and continuous delivery. Joe changes roles between coach, developer, architect or tester to demonstrate where the challenges are and work with teams to solve them.

Tackling 16 years of legacy code with mob programming and Lego

Jan 24, 2017

Picture the scene. You’ve joined a new team that work on the most important product in the company. There’s just one catch. The code base is using 2002 technology and the attitude has been “get it done” since then.

Things need to change fast. To reduce the amount of work in process you adopt mob programming – where the whole team work on only one task together on one computer – and start creating a culture of safety over fear. Things start to feel better but you can’t help but feel that your being distracted from your goal.

In this case study you will learn about how a team can go from individuals to a mob. You’ll also hear how the most powerful improvement tool the team found was to use Lego to represent time spent. After this you’ll know about mob programming, making problems visual with Lego and how that combination doubled the productivity for this team in six months.

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