Context

Introduced to me by Aron, and practiced with Victor & Chady. The three of us were assigned to a story, and worked closely together for a few months. A healthy portion of our engineering hours were spent mob programming in a Slack huddle, and that was great for:

• High bandwidth knowledge transfer
• Real time reviews
• Fast feedback loops

Sync pair programming isn’t always an option

Sometimes schedules don’t align, or people would prefer to work alone.

This is where ping pong comes in, if you still prefer to work on one ticket together, for similar benefits to sync pair programming.

One person works on a ticket for 2 - 4 hours, then hands it over to the next engineer. Hence the ping pong analogy. Back, forth, back, forth.