Patterns: Summaries

A mob is having trouble following up one another’s intent
When typer are having trouble understanding the bigger picture as they’re typing.
A mob wants to maintain alignment on where they’re headed

To resolve confusion and misunderstandings about the intent of the mob, where they are heading and what just happened.

There are two variations of this pattern:

The original: As the typer finishes their turn of typing, they give a brief summary to the mob about what they just did and why. This is good for helping typers maintain a higher level picture of what is happening as they’re typing.
The Brightside: as the talker finish their turn of talking they state to the mob where their intent would go next. This is good for helping new mobs maintain high alignment and psychological safety and reminding the next talker to follow up on the previous talker’s intent.

Both versions are good for helping the entire mob keep track of the intent and what just happened.

Higher alignment on the mob.
In the case of the original pattern, mobbers develop greater psychological safety as the team members need to get used to taking risk and potentially being wrong in front of one another.
In the original pattern, mobbers get used to thinking about the code at multiple levels as they work with it
In the Brightside pattern, mobbers develop greater psychological safety as talkers get used to having their intent followed up on
In the Brightside pattern, new mobs may gain momentum faster as the intent of the last talker doesn’t need to be inferred.

Mobbing Pattern Language