For a technology company, building a strong engineering culture is essential for long-term success. Today's software industry is growing so fast that a large proportion of developers will inevitably have less than 5 years experience. It's a constant challenge for everyone to keep up-to-date with the latest techniques and to communicate a healthy culture to newcomers.
The Samman method is a concrete coaching method for spreading skills and culture within an engineering organization. There are two main parts to the method:
- Learning Hour
- Ensemble working
In the learning hour the coach uses exercises and active learning techniques to teach the theory and practice of skills like Test-Driven Development and Refactoring. In two-hour Ensemble sessions the whole team collaborates together with the coach in applying agile development techniques in their usual production codebase.
In combination with strong technical leadership, the Samman method can enable the spread of skills and culture to bring a healthy engineering organization to the next level.
Continuous Testing is a strong predictor of successful continuous delivery and DevOps according to the Accelerate State of DevOps report (2021).
"By incorporating early and frequent testing throughout the delivery process, with testers working alongside developers throughout, teams can iterate and make changes to their product, service, or application more quickly"
Many organizations aspire to be an elite DevOps performer, delivering changes into production on-demand with lead times of less than one hour. It's not easy to achieve, and as well as investing in tools and infrastructure, developers will often need to learn new skills and collaboration techniques. This workshop is designed for developers working in that kind of ambitious organization, looking for ways to improve automated testing and ship quality code more often.
In this workshop you will learn:
How Continuous Testing fits into the big picture of Continuous Delivery and DevOps
Effective ways to design a delivery pipeline including automated testing steps
Some architectural choices that can make your system easier to test
Approval testing - a technique especially suited for getting existing code under test and for component testing
All participants at the workshop will receive a copy of the "Pipeline Game" card deck to take home. (https://www.eficode.com/pipeline-game)
The workshop will involve hands-on exercises and you should bring a laptop. The languages we'll use are Python and Java - the instructor will provide a programming environment so you'll only need a laptop and browser.
Detailed Agenda
Introduction to Continuous Testing (slides, discussion) - 60 mins
Pipeline Card Game (hands-on, designing pipelines) - 120 mins
break for lunch
Architecting for testability (slides, discussion, demo) - 60 mins
Approval testing intro (exercise) - 60 mins
Component tests (exercise, discussion) - 60 mins
Wrap-up (slides, discussion) - 30 mins
Emily Bache is a Samman Technical Coach with ProAgile. She helps teams to improve their coding and testing skills, including Test-Driven Development. Emily lives in Göteborg, Sweden, but is originally from the UK. She is the author of "Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman method" and "The Coding Dojo Handbook". Emily often speaks at international conferences.
