Overrun Navigators, Strong Opinions, and Doc Reading: Prof Ben’s Mobbing Questions from the Trenches

2025-05-13

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🎙️ In this episode of The Mob Mentality Show, we’re joined by Professor Ben Kovitz—a former software developer with 15 years of industry experience who went on to earn a PhD and is now teaching Computer Science at Cal Poly Humboldt. Prof Ben flips the script and brings his own real-world mob programming questions—challenges he’s faced while mobbing live with college students in the classroom. This is not theory. These are hard-won questions from the trenches of mob programming in a learning environment,...

🎙️ In this episode of The Mob Mentality Show, we’re joined by Professor Ben Kovitz—a former software developer with 15 years of industry experience who went on to earn a PhD and is now teaching Computer Science at Cal Poly Humboldt. Prof Ben flips the script and brings his own real-world mob programming questions—challenges he’s faced while mobbing live with college students in the classroom.

This is not theory. These are hard-won questions from the trenches of mob programming in a learning environment, where curiosity meets complexity, and group dynamics get real.

🔍 We dive deep into 5 key challenges:

1. Deep Thought vs. Mob Timers:
How do you carve out time to think deeply, explain thoroughly, or research ideas in a setting where timers tick every 3 minutes? Is it “wrong” to step away from the mob to figure something out? We discuss balancing solo exploration with group momentum, and how to build a culture that supports both.

2. Upfront Design or Just Start Mobbing?
Do you need to pre-design work before mobbing, or can product discovery and agile planning happen in the mob itself? We explore Kanban, Continuous Delivery (CD), and even SPIDR story splitting as tools for flowing work in real time.

3. The Overrun Navigator:
What happens when a mob gets too rowdy and drowns out the navigator—especially one who doesn’t yet know what to do? We unpack the difference between “good rowdy” energy and “bad rowdy” imbalance, and how facilitation, structured roles, or even a moment of silence can reset the team.

4. The Strong Opinion Navigator:
Is it okay for someone with strong, often-correct opinions to mob effectively? How do we avoid stifling experimentation or learning? We tackle the value of letting experiments speak, coaching with humility, and using dominant voices to model vulnerability instead of control.

5. Mobbing with Documentation and AI:
Should the mob read documentation together? What about using AI tools? We cover how teams can mob to teach effective doc reading, search strategies, and prompt engineering, while still adapting workflows to individual learning zones and WIP (Work in Progress) constraints.

💡 This episode is full of insights on:

Group facilitation in real-time coding
Balancing solo and group learning
Creating psychological safety in a mob
Adapting mob rules to context—not dogma
Bringing agile, XP (Extreme Programming), and education together in the mobbing practice