Agile technical coaching is about helping teams adopt agile engineering practices that are essential to succeeding with Scrum. These practices help teams and organizations realize the benefits of Scrum, like faster time to market, faster return on investment, reduced risk, improved quality, and increased adaptiveness to be able to quickly respond to changing requirements and changing market conditions.
To realize these benefits, Scrum teams must deliver a working product increment at the end of every Sprint. This is a working product that’s production ready every Sprint. Yet many teams and organizations struggle with this concept and work Sprint after Sprint without a tangible deliverable. This is mostly due to messy code, weak technical practices, lack of build, test, and deployment automation, and an inability to build things iteratively and incrementally. To get a better understanding of these issues and the various stages teams go through in their Agile adoption, follow the Guiding Your Team to Technical Excellence blog series.
The agile engineering practices that make this a reality include Test Driven Development, pair programming, ensemble programming, test automation, and continuous integration and deployment. These practices break down silos between teams and team members and require team members to work together collaboratively. The practices shift testing to the left so that quality is built in from the beginning. Testing becomes an ongoing activity that starts on day 1 and not a phase that is done at the end. The practices ensure that teams are always working of a solid foundation and keeping technical debt low. With high quality code, low technical debt, and an automated regression test suite, code becomes easy to change and teams can easily respond and deliver on changing requirements.
The technical coach helps teams improve their code base and get their technical debt under control. The coach works side by side with the developers helping them adopt and apply these agile engineering practices.
If you are looking for technical coaching, please contact us to discuss how we can help.
