Posts Tagged ‘EmilyBache’
[DevoxxUK2025] Software Excellence in Large Orgs through Technical Coaching
Emily Bache, a seasoned technical coach, shared her expertise at DevoxxUK2025 on fostering software excellence in large organizations through technical coaching. Drawing on DORA research, which correlates high-quality code with faster delivery and better organizational outcomes, Emily emphasized practices like test-driven development (TDD) and refactoring to maintain code quality. She introduced technical coaching as a vital role, involving short, interactive learning hours and ensemble programming to build developer skills. Her talk, enriched with a refactoring demo and insights from Hartman’s proficiency taxonomy, offered a roadmap for organizations to reduce technical debt and enhance team performance.
The Importance of Code Quality
Emily began by referencing DORA research, which highlights capabilities like test automation, code maintainability, and small-batch development as predictors of high-performing teams. She cited a study by Adam Tornhill and Marcus Borie, showing that poor-quality code can increase development time by up to 124%, with worst-case scenarios taking nine times longer. Technical debt, or “cruft,” slows feature delivery and makes schedules unpredictable. Practices like TDD, refactoring, pair programming, and clean architecture are essential to maintain code quality, ensuring software remains flexible and cost-effective to modify over time.
Technical Coaching as a Solution
In large organizations, Emily noted a gap in technical leadership, with architects often focused on high-level design and teams lacking dedicated tech leads. Technical coaches bridge this gap, working part-time across teams to teach skills and foster a quality culture. Unlike code reviews, which reinforce existing knowledge, coaching proactively builds skills through hands-on training. Emily’s approach involves collaborating with architects and tech leads, aligning with organizational goals while addressing low-level design practices like TDD and refactoring, which are often neglected but critical for maintainable code.
Learning Hours for Skill Development
Emily’s learning hours are short, interactive sessions inspired by Sharon Bowman’s training techniques. Developers work in pairs on exercises, such as refactoring katas (e.g., Tennis Refactoring Kata), to practice skills like extracting methods and naming conventions. A demo showcased decomposing a complex method into readable, well-named functions, emphasizing deterministic refactoring tools over AI assistants, which excel at writing new code but struggle with refactoring. These sessions teach vocabulary for discussing code quality and provide checklists for applying skills, ensuring developers can immediately use what they learn.
Ensemble Programming for Real-World Application
Ensemble programming brings teams together to work on production code under a coach’s guidance. Unlike toy exercises, these sessions tackle real, complex problems, allowing developers to apply TDD and refactoring in context. Emily highlighted the collaborative nature of ensembles, where senior developers mentor juniors, fostering team learning. By addressing production code, coaches ensure skills translate to actual work, bridging the gap between training and practice. This approach helps teams internalize techniques like small-batch development and clean design, improving code quality incrementally.
Hartman’s Proficiency Taxonomy
Emily introduced Hartman’s proficiency taxonomy to explain skill acquisition, contrasting it with Bloom’s thinking-focused taxonomy. The stages—familiarity, comprehension, conscious effort, conscious action, proficiency, and expertise—map the journey from knowing a skill exists to applying it fluently in production. Learning hours help developers move from familiarity to conscious effort with exercises and feedback, while ensembles push them toward proficiency by applying skills to real code. Coaches tailor interventions based on a team’s proficiency level, ensuring steady progress toward mastery.
Getting Started with Technical Coaching
Emily encouraged organizations to adopt technical coaching, ideally led by tech leads with management support to allocate time for mentoring. She shared resources from her Samman Coaching website, including kata descriptions and learning hour guides, available through her nonprofit society for technical coaches. For mixed-experience teams, she pairs senior developers with juniors to foster mentoring, turning diversity into a strength. Her book, Samman Technical Coaching, and monthly online meetups provide further support for aspiring coaches, aiming to spread best practices and elevate code quality across organizations.