Laurent Bossavit

My LinkedIn profile offers a broad overview of my career: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bossavit/For more substantive insight into my interests, some of my talks and topics are available on the Web. (I am, however, not the type of person who has a web site pulling together all of their publications, talks, and so on…) Here is a representative one that has speaker notes…

This Miro mindmap (possibly incomplete, possibly somewhat biased) provides a tour of my "toolbox" of competencies (created for the purpose of sharing with my colleagues at CodeWorks).

More focused work samples:

• My stint within Orange France where I applied Lean and Toyota Kata approaches to a complex legacy codebase (in addition to technical coaching on "basics" such as refactoring techniques, TDD and other testing tactics); as documented in this public presentation I also focused on a specific problem facing the team, long times to reproduce bugs experienced in production by end users; over several iterations of coaching and improvement I was able to lead the teams in reducing the time required for repro from 8 days median calendar time, to a guaranteed less than 5 minutes.
• My time with OpenFisca, a macroeconomics simulation engine built on Python and Numpy, also a 12 year old codebase, large and complex. This Github issue is representative of my communication and thinking style. It capped months of continuously engaging with the code in small and focused PRs adding tests and incrementally improving the design, building up an understanding of what, underneath the cruft, the system could aspire to become. (As a caveat, note that this was more hands-on role than is proposed for our intervention at GE; it is intended as representative of what could result from the team applying the techniques we offer coaching on.)

Christophe Thibaut

I help people solving complex problems together.

I have been passing on insights into the practice of TDD ever since I’ve learned it back in 2000. In the last 20 years I have designed and given several training courses on the practice of TDD in different contexts (greenfield projects, core domain, legacy apps) in many programming languages (Java, C#, C, C++, js, ruby, python, haskell) .

Using the Test First build pattern in addition with User Story and Short Feedback Loops interaction patterns, I have participated in, led or trained many agile software development projects in areas such as banking, insurance, e-commerce, electricity distribution, industrial gases.

I trained hundreds of customer and internal teams in TDD, initiated and led a transition to a "crafters" state of art in my company that includes TDD, BDD, Code Design, Software Architecture, Communication, Feedback and Technical Leader mentoring. For the last ten years I have been focusing on helping customers with strategies to make "legacy" software a viable and workable asset again. These strategies invariably involve technical, organizational, team communication and problem solving skills at different levels : developers, technical leaders, managers and customer reps and sponsors.

Capabilities

Specific capabilities that we are able to deploy include (but are not limited to) the following. Please do not assume this is a complete list, we encourage you to ask « Do you know <specific technique> » or « Can you help with <specific problem> ». In return we pledge to be clear if we don’t know or have superficial knowledge.

• Ensemble Programming sessions. Hands-on group work, on the code that the team works with daily. The group selects an objective (work on a feature, add a test, refactor a section of code), and works together using "strong-style pairing": an idea must pass through someone else's hands before reaching the code. After each 90-minute session the group reflects on three levels: what did we learn about the codebase; what did we learn about how we create and change code; what did we learn about being an effective "Ensemble". This affords for fast sharing of norms and techniques among the group.
• Mikado Method. An Ensemble session focused on refactoring, where the main objective is to discover a strategic path to a desired end state of the design.
• Slow debugging. An Ensemble session focused on investigating a specific bug.