Alex is a developer who tries to help other developers reach their potential. He is the most experienced European code retreat facilitator and the second in the world, as he started facilitating with Maria Diaconu in 2009, almost at the same time as in the US. He promotes the technical practices (TDD, pair programming, unit testing, continuous integration, refactoring etc.) while being pragmatic about their value and the good reasons for adoption.

Topic: How to Create a Great Technical Team

So you’ve adopted Scrum or Kanban or any kind of process. Your team starts producing features at great speed and you think you’ve reached the heaven of hyperproductivity. And then, something strange happens: the team starts discussing how to manage bugs in an iterative process, they say they need a refactoring period and you need to throw more resources at testing. You decide to start adopting automated tests, because they will help reduce bugs and technical debt. 6 months after, developers complain that they cannot use the tests anymore because they are slow, give random results and in general cannot be trusted. And that’s when you decide you need outside help.

But can you do it differently? What if I told you that with the right upfront investment, your team can reach the point when the technical issues are not the bottleneck anymore and when you need to gather requirements faster? What if you could deploy as often as it’s useful and get feedback from interested end-users? Does this sound like a good ROI?

This is a talk about what you can achieve with sound technical practices, what is their value and tips from my experience on how to implement them in a company.

Read about Alex here.