Samman Technical Coaching
Hands-on team-based training to help developers write better code, use AI tools effectively, and enjoy their work more.
What is a Technical Coach?
You may previously have hired an agile coach to help your development team. A technical coach is similar, but more focused on the code and how it is being written. This video explains more.
Quality Code = Happy Developers + Agile Teams
High-quality code unlocks agility – and keeps developers engaged, taking pride in their work.
This coaching helps teams grow the skills they need to write clean, testable code – using powerful tools like AI and proven techniques grounded in software craft.
“Working with Emily Bache in the Samman coaching sessions was a highly valuable experience for our teams. The coaching combined clear theory with hands‑on ensemble work, helping us better understand how to approach legacy code, refactoring, and test design in a safe and structured way.
The teams left the sessions confident that they can use the techniques and ideas introduced. At the same time, the coaching made it very clear that real mastery comes from continued practice. The foundations are now in place, and the teams know what to do — the next step is to keep applying these approaches consistently until they become everyday habits.
Emily’s calm, precise facilitation and her ability to guide without taking over created a strong learning environment and encouraged shared ownership of the code. We would highly recommend her coaching to teams who want to improve technical quality sustainably and are willing to invest in turning good practices into long‑term habits.”
– Doreen Locher — Siemens AG, Digital Industries, Process Automation
Real teams – real progress
Emily combines a high-level of technical knowledge and experience with sensitivity and understanding of the practical challenges developers face on a daily basis.
This makes her an effective and rare kind of technical coach.
– Peter Caron, CEO at 3T Software Labs
Team Learning, Designed for Real Work
Learning is most effective when it happens with your own team. That’s why this training is built around collaborative, hands-on practice in small groups – not long lectures.
Team Coaching Sessions
Together with your teammates, you’ll gain practical coding skills and develop a shared understanding of what good code looks like.
Each session is supported by a structured package of materials and involves real work in the normal production codebase.
What participants say
“The Samman coaching with Emily Bache sharpened our ability to work effectively in legacy code by identifying code smells, applying disciplined refactoring patterns (e.g. removing duplication, extracting data clumps), and improving test coverage and structure using approval tests in ensemble programming.“
— Coaching Participant — Siemens AG, Digital Industries, Process Automation
Why Samman Technical Coaching Works
Many developers today have powerful IDEs and access to AI coding assistants – but few know how to use them effectively. This training focuses on software craft: the everyday skills and habits that lead to readable, flexible, high-quality code – and stronger teams.
This training is designed to be done part-time alongside normal work. This gives developers time to explore new techniques, reflect, and gradually build better habits – without needing to “pause” real development.
“What stood out most was the strong resonance with the teams. Even those who were initially skeptical about the added value came back confident that they had fully understood the concepts, could apply them in practice, and clearly saw the benefits. The training created shared clarity and motivation, and teams felt well equipped to use the techniques in their day-to-day work.”
– Emanuel Eick, Siemens AG, Digital Industries, Process Automation
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you prevent AI-Generated Slop code?
It is very easy to generate a lot of poor quality code with AI tools. In this coaching we teach engineering practices and patterns that help to keep code quality high and reduce the risk of the AI tools introducing bugs. Developers learn about patterns of prompting and harness design to prevent unnecessary risks and bad code.
What programming languages are supported?
We work with whatever programming language the team is using. The fundamental technical skills we are teaching are relevant in all languages and platforms. We have coached teams using anything from Typescript to C# to Java to Python, C++, C and even Erlang on occasion.
How long does the coaching take?
Each block of coaching runs over several weeks, interleaved with regular work. Teams typically spend ten half days over a period of 4-5 weeks. We can adjust the coaching for shorter or longer engagements as needed.
Who benefits most?
All developers can benefit from improving their engineering skills and the coaching will focus on the needs of the team. We find the people who benefit the most are the more engaged developers who actively try out the new skills between sessions.
What’s in each session?
Each coaching session will include some training on example code to introduce basic skills and terminology. We follow that with real work in the team’s production codebase.
How can we scale this to cover more teams?
The Samman method is widely used by technical coaches today. We can provide additional experienced coaches with proven track records to scale the coaching to more teams and multiply the impact.
Samman Technical Coaching is ideal for organizations who want to strengthen their software development teams, adopt effective AI tools and raise the bar for code quality.
Contact us to learn more or book your training.