Mob Programming and Simultaneous Style Pair Programming in the Development of a Battle Royale Game: An Action Research

Abstract

This paper is an Action Research about adopting Mob Programming and Simultaneous Style Pair Programming to develop a battle royale game called Pirate Ship Battles. Mob Programming helps the developers to learn an open-source framework for games called Phaser and another one called Jest to automatization of the tests. The following are two examples of insights that occurred respectively in the first and third cycles of action research. The team collaboratively agreed to start by learning in a Mob Programming doing the infra-structure to the tests and also to deepen the knowledge about Phaser should help in the next parts of the project. Another example of insight occurred in the third cycle of this action research is about testing activity, fixing the bugs, was observed funnier comparing with testing alone. The team reported it was funnier testing altogether, when a mistake happens to run new code, everybody paying attention to the projector on the fault, a ready joke. Perhaps, because they are friends and the project is a game. Another possible explanation about our experience of funnier testing activity in a Mob Programming compared to testing alone is that we humans are social beings. Concluding, the source code of the game is of excellent quality as evaluated by CodeClimate by classifying it with grade A, the developers enjoyed, and both approaches increased the learnings.