Technical Agile Coach

Specializing in leading and coaching software engineering teams to achieve high performance and effectiveness.

Mission

My personal mission is to help make teams awesome. I want everyone to be proud of what they build, to be courageous enough to learn together, and to never stop improving.

I accomplish this by:

  • Coaching teams to use modern software engineering practices, founded in Extreme Programming values, principles, and practices.

  • Encouraging teams to create psychologically safe environments in order to experiment and learn rapidly.

  • Engaging teams to find their own solutions to problems they recognize to promote self-management.

  • Leading teams in healthy, respectful debate in order to plan and design more effectively.

  • Implementing Scrum and Kanban as foundational frameworks upon which to build a team’s domain-specific processes.

Experience

  • 16 years of software engineering experience

  • 11 years of Extreme Programming practice

  • 7 years experience on Scrum and XP teams

  • 9 years experience technical consulting

Career Highlights

Integral Tech, LLC

Ford Motor Company - E-Commerce

  • Hands-on technical coaching with five teams responsible for the delivery of a new online vehicle purchasing experience. Teams were able to baseline DORA metrics and make categorical improvements in their throughput and delivery according to the industry standard measures. Coached teams in the following technical skills:

    • Contract Testing

    • Acceptance Testing

    • Test-Driven Development

    • Continuous Integration - Reduction of average lifetime of feature branches from weeks to days. In some cases, introduced Trunk-Based Development

  • Product coaching with product managers and other leadership to introduce Behavior-Driven Development and Domain-Driven Design, solving key problems in communication, documentation, and product iteration resulting in reduction in rework and coordination costs

  • Individually mentored Tech Anchors and other engineers to spread craftsmanship practices across teams

  • Contributed to development of Delivery Pipeline automation to showcase how to reduce the risk of individual deployments

Ford Motor Company - GPRS

  • Hands-on technical coaching with two teams responsible for vehicle configuration platforms used across the company.

CPrime, Inc

Kroger - Product Led Journey Engagement

  • Worked as Technical Coach paired with Product Coaches to lead Kroger technical teams through the “Dojo Challenge”, a 4-week immersive learning where teams practice new discovery and technical skills and tools to find ways to improve performance and efficacy

  • Collaborated with other Technical and Product Coaches to create and experiment with other immersive learning offerings for teams of all types

  • Explored different ways of both qualitatively and quantitatively measuring the value of the Dojo and other immersive experiences to drive improvement in their delivery

Resultant

Agile Software Engineering Training Series

  • Collaborated across departments with SAFe-certified coach, Scrum Masters, and project managers to build process and practice documentation and training

    • Software Engineering Agile Playbook - A team structure and process guide for new teams

    • Leading Practices Guides - A department-wide explanation of practices and the contexts in which they work best

    • Team Training Materials - Curriculum, slide decks, and other interactive aides to execute team training

Small Projects Team

Skills

  • Team technical coaching (Dojo, Samman)

  • Team facilitation

  • Classroom teaching & presentation

  • One-on-one mentoring

  • Non-Violent Communication

  • Extreme Programming (XP) practices for modern Agile engineering:

    • Energized Work

    • Pair/Mob Programming

    • Continuous Integration

    • Test-Driven Development

    • Incremental Design

  • Continuous Delivery (Cloud infrastructure & DevOps pipelines)

  • Refactoring

  • Test automation & Shift-left testing

  • Web application architecture

  • Microsoft .NET Framework/Core

  • JavaScript/TypeScript

  • Relational Databases (MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle)

  • Wordpress/PHP (wpengine.com)

  • Created team to organize around small- and medium-sized projects

  • Facilitated team chartering to create a vision, mission, objectives, and team boundaries

  • Used Kanban to define workflow, classes of service, work-in-progress (WIP) limits, and maximize flow

  • Facilitated daily planning meeting

  • Facilitated Retrospectives to improve relationships, processes, and tools

CoRE Software Suite (HHS Unifi, Indiana MPH ERE)

  • Established new standards of CI/CD for many ongoing projects

  • Brought Quality Assurance engineering into the current sprint instead of trailing to improve flow

  • Introduced and taught unit tests (microtesting) techniques for middleware engineers

  • Introduced business layer of application architecture

  • Taught SOLID principles and demonstrated inversion of control to team

Scrum Team Improvements

  • Led team in healthy debate to improve designs and processes

  • Taught team to create user-focused work items

  • Taught team to more narrowly and vertically slice functionality so deliverables are small, discrete, and complete (Minimum Marketable Feature - MMF)

  • Coached organization in the value and execution of team self-selection

  • Coached team to include entire Scrum Team in backlog refinement meetings, which improved the team's understanding of their estimates

  • Coached team to experiment with more ways to get planning value out of Daily Scrum: work-focused updates instead of individual updates

  • Coached team leadership in ways to improve team self-organization

Seven Corners, Inc.

  • Served as a mentor to many junior level engineers 

  • Coached the software team to use Agile engineering practices such as pair and mob programming, test-driven development, unit testing, and automated acceptance testing

  • Advocated for Quality Assurance automation tester positions to be added, and included them on the Scrum Team as members

  • Led book clubs on “Working Effectively With Legacy Code”, “Head First Design Patterns”, and “Clean Code”

  • Led the team to a healthy culture of respectful debate 

  • In less than two years, my direct influence: 

    • Reduced the bug/defect rate from over 20 per sprint to 2

    • Reduced the production hotfix rate from 5 per month to 1 per quarter

    • Increased unit tests from about 1,000 to over 13,000 

    • Added all automated tests to the CI/CD pipeline 

    • Refactored a 128 project solution down to 85 with 15+ NuGet packages and 10+ microservices 

Eleven Fifty Academy

Executive Board Member (2023 - Current)

  • Advising on educational and business direction, focused on Software Engineering curriculum

Senior Curriculum Mentor, Instructor

  • Advised learning objectives such as pair and group work, using test harnesses as a learning tool, and coached full-time instructors in their own skill advancement

  • Taught week-long classes of 20 or more people in basic and intermediate level web and mobile app design and programming skills