Crossover with Mob Mentailty Part 2

Oct 21, 2025

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Key Topics

[05:30] Cross-disciplinary mobbing with firmware and hardware engineers in IoT development
[12:45] Addressing efficiency objections: Local vs global optimization in embedded teams
[18:20] DevOps collaboration patterns and reducing friction between software and infrastructure teams
[25:10] Selling mob programming to management: Building trust through continuous delivery
[35:40] Dynamic team composition and the law of personal mobility in technical teams
[42:15] Coordinating mob teams with waterfall processes and hardware gate systems
[48:30] Automated firmware protocol documentation and testing infrastructure

Notable Quotes

"When you initially hear about mobbing, you think everybody's inactive, but there's a lot of excess thought capacity around programming that can happen - somebody can be thinking about refactorings while others are typing the solution." — Chris Lucian

"If you're all there, that whole feedback loop can happen in 15 minutes as opposed to 15 days. It's like technical debt - you pay now or pay later, and if you pay later, it's going to be more expensive." — Austin Chadwick

"We tend to have multiple releases a day all the way to production. Most mobs will deliver to production at least twice a day - four hours of work and then deliver to prod." — Chris Lucian

Resources Mentioned

Mob Mentality Show - Podcast dedicated to mob programming practices and extreme programming techniques
Kent Beck's Test-Driven Development Book - Foundational resource for understanding true TDD practices in embedded development
Amy Edmondson's Teaming Book - Framework for understanding high uncertainty and high interdependence scenarios in technical teams
Liminal Thinking - Mental framework for breaking through belief-based barriers in agile transformation

You can find Jeff at https://jeffgable.com.
You can find Luca at https://luca.engineer.

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Are you looking for embedded-focused trainings? Head to https://agileembedded.academy/
Ryan Torvik and Luca have started the Embedded AI podcast, check it out at https://embeddedaipodcast.com/