Samman is a method for people who want to make a difference and improve the way software is built. The focus is specifically on technical practices and how people write code, and it’s the best way I know to help software developers to adopt practices like TDD and Refactoring. A Samman technical coach divides their time between several software development teams and 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.
If you’re a technical coach, or simply have aspirations to help your team adopt agile technical practices, Samman gives concrete actionable ways of working to achieve change. I’ve been working with this method for several years now, in a variety of organizations. I’ve been pleased with the results I’ve seen, in particular improved awareness of what technical agile practices are and a desire to do them at a team level. I published a book about the Samman method in January 2021, the foreword is written by Kent Beck.
This presentation is a summary of the main points of the book. My main aim is to encourage others to improve the way they do technical agile coaching.
