Enhancing Mob Programming with Mixed Reality: Matthys's Research on Improving Developer Experience

Master’s thesis submission season is upon us, and, in the SNAIL Team, Matthys is opening it in style with a fascinating topic. Matthys’s research investigates how mixed reality can be leveraged to improve developer experience. Modern software development practices tend to emphasize more and more human interactions over siloed desktop-centered development tasks. Mob programming is such a practice. Mob Programming “is a software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing simultaneously, in the same space, and on the same computer. This extends the concept of pair programming from two people working together to the entire team continuously collaborating on a single computer to deliver a single work item at a time.”

However, for the Mob and the Navigator (the developers who are not in front of a computer), it might not be easy to make decisions without proper quantitative and objective data about the codebase. In his research work, Matthys has been investigating how equipping members of the Mob with Mixer Reality devices (specifically a Meta Quest headset) might help provide this extra layer of quantitative data from the SonarQube instance while guaranteeing not to break human interactions as sitting in front of a computer screen might do. This is a fascinating exploration of a possible future of software development that could revolutionize the way we work. And it’s also a promising collaboration between the SNAIL team and Prof. Bruno Dumas, with the potential to shape the future of software development.

Interested? Don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re open to collaboration and eager to test our researchers' prototypes in the wild, where they can potentially revolutionize the way we develop software.