Technical Excellence Doesn't Just Happen – Igniting a Craftsmanship Culture

The ninth principle from the Agile Manifesto states that technical excellence enhances agility, but when the codebase is ugly and the deadlines are tight, most teams don’t choose to refactor mercilessly, adopt TDD, or evaluate automated testing tools—unless they have the proper support. In our experience working with multiple teams in a single codebase, developers can feel victim to a legacy codebase if only a few people are writing clean code or refactoring; guiding them on how to decrease technical debt while delivering their projects helps "unstuck" their other agile practices. We will talk about the challenges we’ve seen with Product Owners, Managers, and Scrum Masters interacting with teams at various stages of agile+technical excellence and how a focus on technical practices sparked a wider interest in craftsmanship. Learn how can you influence the team towards the right practices while fostering their sense of ownership. Getting serious about technical excellence requires support from technical and non-technical roles, and we’ll share how we partnered as coaches to help an organization through a technical turnaround with some tips for others who need to do the same.

• Mike Rieser

  1 Recording

  Michael Rieser is an Agile Coach, Developer and Mentor with a deep technical background and understanding of software development practices. He advises and mentors analysts, testers, developers, project managers, directors, and VPs on the current best practices in Software Development. He firmly believes that best practices are primarily governed by Agile values and principles, incorporate thinking from Lean Manufacturing, and are at their core iterative and incremental.

• Allison Pollard

  3 Recordings

  Allison Pollard is an Agile Coach with Improving in Dallas who helps people discover and develop their agile instincts. She enjoys mentoring others to become great Scrum Masters, coaching managers to grow teams that deliver amazing results, and fostering communities that provide sustainability for agile transformations. Allison is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, an organizer of the Dallas-Fort Worth Scrum user group, a foodie, and a trebuchet builder.

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