As Agile Practice Lead my role focused on training, implementing development best practices, improving software development processes and developing a strong culture at Kurt Geiger. The role consists of many different responsibilities, detailed below is some of what I work on on a daily basis.
Development Practices
Workshops
Part of the role involved me developing workshops covering development practices such as TDD. The training program I put together at KG was made up of the following workshop as well as additional smaller ones on anything from git usage to pair programming.
Clean Code
My aim here was to focus on an emphasis that the most important aspect of writing code is communication. Code must be understood easily by other developers.
Workshops on clean code cover best practices when writing code. I use these sessions to discuss with developers how best we can write code that is both readable and maintainable.
After establishing a concensus amongst workshop groups on clean code techniques workshops move toward implementing these techniques on both legacy and new codebases through mob programming sessions. Additional support for developers is provided through pair programming sessions with me.
Test Driven Development
These workshops focused on trying to introduce and maintain a culture of test driven development.
The concept of test driven development is introduced as are some of the testing tools we use. As pairs developers then attempt a series of coding exercises where they write the tests first before the code.
To understand real world application of TDD we'll go through a feature a developer is working on as a mob using the TDD techniques establised in earlier workshops.
End To End Testing
Aim was to help establish BDD development techniques and standards around that.
This workshop covers the tools we use for end to end testing and the best practices around writing these.
This also introduces people to the Gherkin syntax we use to write tests in a human readable way and the ideas of Behaviour Driven Development. I'll usually involve a non developer team member in this workshop to help define the Gherkin steps and then write the tests together.
Agile Practices
The other side to my role was a focus on improving the day to day agile practices performed by each of the teams. This meant supporting each individual team and the team leads in running planning sessions, retrospectives and work organisation.
Retrospectives
I help facilitate retrospectives with teams running them in different formats depending on the situation. Some of the retro formats I run are:
Start Stop Continue
A simple retrospective. I'll ask participants to write down on post its things they would like their team to start doing, stop doing and continue doing over the next two weeks.
Once everyone has written something down i'll ask each individual to share their starts, stops and continues and stick them on the wall. After everyone has finished i'll ask participants to group the post its then vote on which group they would like to make an action for the next two weeks.
Positivity Retro
This retro starts with each team member writing down something they appreciate about their fellow team members. These are then shared to introduce a positive amostphere from the start.
Culture Change
Onboarding Improvements
Using Lean UX techniques we've looked into the issues around the developer onboarding process at Kurt Geiger. As part of these I've conducted research into difficulties developers have faced during the onboarding process through interviews and surveys.
Working with a small team we identified problems from the feedback and begun working on a small soulution for one of these problems, here the focus has been on small and fast iterations of an onboarding platform. Getting it into the hands of our users as quickly as possible and iterating on their feedback.