February 2010 CAMUG - Making Your Team Your Tribe: Coaching and Being Coached in Agile Development

Ever looked up the classic stereotype of a computer programmer? If you have, you will probably recognize that the developers working in agile teams don't match that stereotype. Rather than working alone, agile team members tend to work in pairs, groups, teams. Rather than hiding their work until the very end, agile team members ask and receive feedback many times per day and work side-by-side with their end-user.

Why the change? If classical computer science and engineering education doesn't include this team-based approach to work, then how does a practitioner gain these skills on the job? What sort of skills are these so-called "soft skills" anyway?

In this talk, Adam boils down the soft skills to "coaching and being coached". Further, Adam believes that there is much that the software industry can learn on teamwork and coaching from other disciplines, particularly high-level sporting teams. Based on interviews of elite athletes, Adam will present the responses to two questions: 1) what are the key characteristics of your favourite coaches, and 2) if you observed un-coachable team members, what were the characteristics that made them un-coachable? The resulting analysis and observations illustrate why coaching each other is important for team members to master as they strive for delivering the very best for their end-users.

Your contribution to your team has to be more than lines of code, more than smoothly-running automated builds, and more than passing tests. To truly be that team that has skyrocketing productivity and #ftw end-users, each team member has to lead, in some way, at some point in time. Make the team your tribe, then the team's success builds your success, and vice-versa.

Biography

ADAM GERAS is a researcher in software testing, speaker and coach for business people that test enterprise systems.

Adam completed his Masters of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2004 at the University of Calgary based on his research of test-driven development. His was one of the first attempts to unobtrusively measure the impact of test-first thinking in software development projects. Adam's under-graduate work was at the University of Manitoba, completed way back in 1989.

Leading up to that research, Adam spent 14 years working in Calgary as a developer and application architect on software projects in energy, telecommunications, transportation, and insurance industries. He also taught at the University of Calgary before and during his studies there.

In the past 5 years Adam has continued his focus on methods, speaking at agile conferences in North America and Europe on his experiences with test management, test automation, and test practices in general. He is the author of PSExpect, a Powershell function library for automating tests, and has reviewed books and articles written for agile audiences. His most recent efforts have focused on introducing agile practices into enterprise solution delivery projects.

Date: Tuesday, February 2nd. 2010
Time: 6:00-6:30 Juice & Snacks. 6:30-7:30 Presentation.
Where: University of Calgary, ICT 121

Presentation Slides