Software Excellence in Large Orgs through Technical Coaching

Technical leadership concerns not only architecture and overall system design, but also the quality and flexibility of the design at the lowest level. How do you ensure good quality code that is easy to understand and remains cheap to modify over time? Developers need skills like Test-Driven Development and Refactoring to remove cruft and 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 perform poorly at refactoring and enhancing existing designs. How can we ensure developers have the skills they need to develop high quality code?Technical coaching development teams is the best approach I've found so far, and I see it as part of the responsibilities of the architecture team. Technical coaches work with teams part-time to build skills and promote a quality culture. We hold regular, short interactive training sessions, and the format is based on instructional design principles from Marian Hartman and others, which make practical skills like TDD really stick. We also hold ensemble programming sessions and learn to apply these techniques in the relevant production code. 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.