High performing agile development teams excel at delivering what the customer needs, reliably, and on a frequent cadence. The quality and flexibility of the design at the lowest level turns out to be one of the major enabling factors for this kind of success. It takes good technical leadership at the team level to ensure the code is easy to understand and remains cheap to modify over time. Developers need skills like Test-Driven Development and Refactoring to remove cruft and constantly build quality in. The recent boom in AI coding assistants shows a great deal of promise for helping developers to write new code but these tools often perform poorly at enhancing existing designs. In order to play to the strengths of the tools available in this modern landscape we need to ensure developers understand what high quality code looks like and have the skills to achieve it. Technical coaching development teams is the best approach I’ve found so far for building up developer skill and quality culture. Coaches work with teams in their production code part-time and hold regular, short interactive training sessions. This training is based on instructional design principles from Marian Hartman and others, which make practical coding skills like TDD more likely to stick. In this talk I will explain what I’ve found works best in my experiences with large organizations with a lot of existing code, and how you could adapt these ideas for your situation.

Emily Bache is an independent consultant, YouTuber and Technical Coach. She works with developers, training and coaching effective agile practices like Refactoring and Test-Driven Development. Emily has worked with software developmnt for 25 years, written two books and teaches courses on platforms including Pluralsight and O’Reilly. A frequent conferenc speaker, Emily has been invited to keynote at prestigious developer events including EuroPython, Craft and ACCU. Emily founde the Samman Technical Coaching Society in order to promote technical excellence and support coaches everywhere.