Code Your Agility: Tips for Boosting Technical Agility in Your Organization

This is the content I presented at Agile Tour 2015 at Kaunas #agileturas. You can view my talk from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_om9fwD_eNk

Throughout our development careers, we always face with technical impediments. The code we develop always smells, the design and architecture we build always seem overcomplicated. When we notice there is something wrong with the code, we start thinking about how we can improve the quality. We learn more about technologies. We read books, we watch tutorials, we clone git repositories and review source codes. We try to become experts of the technologies we use. But at the every end, even if we become technology experts, we still face with the same old issues. The software we developed is still not good enough.

We focus on learning and using technologies so deeply that we usually forgot the values and practices of developing high quality softwares. We talk about Agility in our organizations as a roadmap for the success, but we usually forget one of the most important aspect of organizational Agility: "Technical Agility".

Technical Agility describes the ability of adapting to change from technical point of view. It includes a new way of looking to the design, the architecture and the source code itself, and to the skills, capabilities and working styles of software developers. From these perspectives, Technical Agility concept fully aligns with Software Craftsmanship philosophy, Agile values, Scrum principles and XP practices.

Technical Agility is not related with the technologies we use. It emphasizes how well we use them and how elaborate we develop software as passioned, disciplined and motivated developers. Building a development culture on top of continuous refactoring, continuous testing, evolutionary design, continuous knowledge sharing and continuous practicing is in the scope of Technical Agility. Without having that mind-shift, we will always fall into traps through our Agility journey.

In this session, I will talk about the key practices I followed to build Agile development culture in my organizations. I will give hints and tips about how to boost technical agility and to adapt Agile engineering practices in your organization by sharing my hands-on experiences throughout my 15 years development career with real stories.