Development Team Mentoring
After attending a conference or training course, developers return to work enthusiastic, motivated, and full of good ideas they want to try. A few days of training are not enough to become proficient, however. A team needs practice to become proficient. Applying new skills like test-driven development, merciless refactoring, agile working, working effectively with legacy code in their daily work is challenging: there’s with work to catch up with, pressure to deliver, complicated legacy code to deal with, and little time to figure out how to apply what they have learned.
In this way, investment in training does not pay off and developers become frustrated and demotivated.
To make sure new practices and new skills get embedded effectively in developers’ daily work, team mentoring is essential. Mentoring allows the team to practice new skills on actual, relevant problems under guidance and become proficient.
Proficient teams enable software delivery excellence.
What we offer
We support teams getting started with good engineering practices or taking their next step. We guide teams to become proficient through team practice sessions and mentoring through pair programming. Teams will learn how to apply new practices in their situation and their own code. Mentoring provides the scaffolding that allows teams to safely practice, experiment, and learn while working on actual, relevant problems.
Why us
Being software practitioners ourselves, we have extensive experience teaching and guiding teams to become better at their trade. Over the last 20 years, we have worked with teams at several clients:
- guiding teams towards DevOps and continuous deployment, going from painful bi-weekly releases with a lot of rework to multiple, high-quality deployments per day;
- mentoring teams in test-driven development, pair programming, and refactoring, to deliver high-quality software in a safety-sensitive environment;
- guiding teams in using AI effectively to improve their engineering skills;
We support your teams in becoming proficient at good engineering practices by practicing on real work until they are able to continue without us.
Benefits
Mentoring enables development teams to become more proficient. This has multiple benefits for the organisation:
- teams that are able to deliver faster and more predictable;
- more stable software – less rework, fewer issues, less firefighting;
- improved delivery confidence through better tests and maintainable code,
- a shared perspective on what good looks like, reducing dependency on individual experts;
- more motivated developers;
- lasting change;
- training investments that actually pay off.
Get lasting capability, safer delivery, and better return on training investment.
Approach
A team mentoring trajectory usually takes 3 to 6 months with our coaches working off and on with the team. The total amount of time and effort depends on factors like number of teams, team size, skill level, and code base complexity. A team working on a large legacy code base will also need to learn specific practices for dealing with legacy code.
We aim to make ourselves redundant: after a team coaching trajectory, the team should be able to apply the new practices on their own.
To make sure a team keeps practicing and learning, we recommend that they regularly organize short learning workshops. We will help them get started with this so that they can continue this themselves.
Alternative options
If a team has not yet followed a training course on development skills, we recommend starting with a training course to practice new skills in a safe environment and to get everyone on the same page.
If you are unsure what support your teams need to become more effective, we recommend doing a team profiency scan. This will provide a clear direction of what is most valuable to do first.