Teaming Case Studies
Two well-documented case studies show what teaming looks like sustained over years rather than as a one-off experiment.
Hunter Industries
Hunter Industries, a US irrigation company, is the longest-running publicly documented mob programming team. The team coined the term "mob programming" and has talked openly about both the benefits and the failure modes they encountered as they scaled the practice.
Timeline:
- 2011 — Started with one team of 5.
- No bugs in production for 1.5 years. A remarkable result that drew attention to the practice. As the team size grew, bugs increased — but the team identified the causes and added extra tests to address them.
- 2016 — Grew to 6 mobs of 5 people each.
- COVID — Developed tools and practices for remote mobbing, including the discipline of committing the work-in-progress branch even half-way through a sentence so the next person could take over instantly.
What it shows: Teaming is a sustainable practice over many years, not a fad. Quality outcomes improve. But scaling teaming across multiple teams requires the same kind of disciplined improvement work as any other engineering practice — bugs reappear if the team stops paying attention to them.
SVT Interactive
SVT Interactive is a Swedish public-broadcasting tech team that documented their mob programming practice across a cross-functional mob.
Setup:
- A mob of 6 people: Product Owner, UX designer, developers, and tester.
Outcomes:
- Fewer misunderstandings. A sense of 100% understanding of the problem or task by the time the team finished discussing it.
- Nobody was indispensable. Mobbing raised the bar of everyone across the team. Knowledge was distributed; no single person was a bottleneck or a single point of failure.
- Zero blockers. No need to wait. The team was almost always able to make decisions on the spot because everyone needed to make those decisions was already in the room.
What it shows: Teaming works with a cross-functional mob, not just a developer-only one. Including the Product Owner, designer, and tester in the same mob removes the handovers between disciplines that normally cause delays — and produces a shared understanding of the work that no document or sign-off can replicate.
Why these matter
Both case studies push back on the most common objection to teaming: "isn't it inefficient to have all those people on one task?" The data from Hunter and SVT suggests the opposite — when the right people are in the room making decisions together, lead time drops and quality goes up.