Skip to main content
Welcome, Soft Skills students.
This lesson (presented by Michael Forrester) explains two closely related collaboration practices used widely in DevOps and engineering teams: co-creating and mobbing. You’ll learn clear definitions, how they differ, when to choose each, and the trade-offs so you can apply them to improve code quality, incident response, onboarding, and team knowledge sharing. Co-creating and mobbing both emphasize joint action and shared responsibility for a single problem, goal, or artefact. Teams that adopt these practices increase cross-functional knowledge, reduce defects, and create more predictable long-term velocity by standardizing approaches and spreading institutional memory.
The slide titled "Co-creating and Mobbing – Understanding the Concepts" shows an illustration of two colleagues standing at a high table with a laptop and a speech bubble containing two interlocking puzzle pieces. A caption below explains the DevOps focus on joint action and shared responsibility, and there's a small inset video of a man speaking in the bottom-right.

​
Definitions and key differences

  • Co-creating
    • A collaborative process where multiple team members actively contribute to the same artefact (code, documentation, design, runbook) at the same time.
    • Contributors often work from their own workstations, adding ideas, code, or edits to a shared space in real time.
    • Emphasizes distributed, parallel contribution and iterative refinement by many actors.
  • Mobbing (mob programming / mobbing in troubleshooting)
    • One person typically “drives” at a single workstation while the rest of the group observes, suggests, reviews, and proposes alternatives.
    • Especially useful for debugging, scripting, incident response, or complex problem-solving where focused collective attention accelerates results.
    • The group collectively owns the outcome even though inputs are often sequenced through a driver and assisting observers.
Both are collaborative but differ in mechanics: co-creating spreads hands-on work across participants simultaneously; mobbing centralizes hands-on interaction while leveraging broad team scrutiny.
An infographic titled "Co-creating and Mobbing – Pair and Mob Programming" showing a diagram of two people working at one workstation for pair programming and several people around one workstation for mob programming. A small video thumbnail of a speaker appears in the bottom-right corner.

​
Pair programming vs mob programming

  • Pair programming
    • Two people collaborate at one workstation; roles of driver and navigator rotate frequently.
    • Commonly used for mentoring, focused development of a feature, or when two perspectives produce faster, higher-quality output.
  • Mob programming
    • The entire team works on the same problem at the same time. One person drives while others act as navigators or commentators.
    • Valuable for complex architecture decisions, onboarding in-context, or when you need rapid consensus and shared understanding.
These approaches can appear slower at the moment because multiple people focus on a single stream of work. The trade-off is fewer defects, reduced rework, faster onboarding, and broader team ownership over time.
A presentation slide titled "Co-creating and Mobbing – Quality Today, Speed Later" showing a rising arrow over four colored pillars labeled Pair and Mob programming, Fewer errors, Less rework, and More sustainable solutions. A small video inset of a presenter appears in the bottom-right.

​
Benefits and trade-offs

Use co-creating for collaborative design and living documentation; use mobbing when concentrated attention on a single system or problem will accelerate resolution or learning (for example: incident response, debugging sessions, or hands-on onboarding).

​
When to choose which approach

  • Use co-creating when:
    • Multiple team members need to make parallel contributions to a shared artefact (e.g., documentation, design work, or working in a shared repo).
    • You want rapid idea generation with distributed ownership.
  • Use mobbing when:
    • You need concentrated team focus to solve a tough bug, script an automation, run through an incident postmortem, or onboard someone with live walkthroughs.
    • Fast consensus, shared situational awareness, or immediate knowledge transfer is critical.
Practical tips
  • Define roles and rotate the driver frequently to avoid bottlenecks.
  • Timebox sessions and agree the goals up-front.
  • For remote teams, ensure good audio/video and a shared cursor or screen tool so everyone can follow and contribute.
  • Capture decisions and action items in a shared place (PR, issue, or runbook) to preserve outcomes.

​
Summary

Co-creating and mobbing are complementary, group-centered practices that increase long-term quality, institutional knowledge, and team collaboration. Co-creating distributes contribution across participants working in parallel on a shared artefact; mobbing concentrates hands-on work while leveraging collective observation and guidance. Both trade short-term speed for higher immediate quality and yield faster long-term velocity by reducing defects and spreading knowledge.
A presentation slide titled "Co-creating and Mobbing – Summary" showing four numbered summary points about co-creating and mobbing. In the bottom-right is a small video inset of a bearded person in a pink shirt speaking.
Thanks for reading this lesson.

Watch Video