What is an Agile Technical Coach?

What is an Agile Technical Coach? By Llewellyn Falco & Jacqueline Bilston

Note: We originally wrote this as an internal memo. It's not meant to be a complete definition, but we thought it might be helpful to others so we are sharing it here.

TL;DR: An agile technical coach writes code with programmers for the purpose of improving how the team programs. Common areas include:

• Refactoring
• Test Driven Development
• DevOps

Overview

The focus of an agile technical coach is specifically on technical practices like refactoring, test driven development, and DevOps. This means that technical coaches are sitting with the programmers, writing code together. Their value is in the sustained behaviours the team continues using after they leave.

Although a coach is not a teacher (who works in practise problems), and a coach is not a consultant (whose main value is delivered while they are working with you), the roles sometimes overlap. A coach often wears the hat of a teacher in short bursts in order to enable a more productive coaching session while working with a team, and only rarely, if ever, acts as a consultant.

Agile is about being able to respond to change. There are two parts that work hand-in-hand to allow this to happen in software. One side comes from the management side of what and when to change. The other side comes from the technical side of having code that is easy to change. Technical Agile Coaches empower Agile Coaches to be able to respond in the ways they want.