Agile Coaching with a Chat Bot. Really?

Agile Coaching with a Chat Bot. Really?

I am a strong believer in face to face interactions.

So much of a believer that I was on a plane almost every week for six months to get to know the people I was working with. We got to know each other, built those connections, built the trust, learn’t from each other. There are many ways to connect with people, to understand each other, and learn from each other.

Here is my list, in order of most effective to least - face to face, video call, phone call, instant messaging / texting, email.

Knowing all that, I just published a chat bot for agile coaching on Slack (https://slack.com/apps/A3AV9RQ9J-ccagile). Bot’s don't even show up as one of the many ways to connect with people.

So, why did I go build a bot for answering questions about agile scrum. These days I am exploring a much broader question. That is “how can technology and new technology trends help make learning not only easier, but also make it stick?”

That question has led me to explore how and if chat bots can help with learning and coaching. We can program chat bots to be more “human”. But, it is still “code” running somewhere, that you interact with you. Trust me - it is, as I just built and published one. I used the Cognitive Services API (from Microsoft) to understand the questions. But, it is still code (somewhat more complex) that is classifying the sentences. So, is there a place for chat bots in coaching? I believe there is, and that is what I am experimenting with, by building this chat bot.

I think chat bots can help with coaching in two ways:

  • Take coaching to the user: Most developers these days live on Slack. So, why not take the coaching to them on the platform they already live on.
  • Power to the experts: The chat bot can tackle some of the basic questions about a subject. This allows the experts to tackle more meaningful questions and issues that need their attention.

Let me know your thoughts. If agile scrum is of interest to you, take the chat bot for a spin on Slack. Give it a try.

[If you are interested in how I built the bot, send me a message. That is a blog for another day!]

Nice post Mukund! What if automated coaching was integrated with a task board (like Trello or JIRA)? Task boards have structured data on the work being done - this has potential to make the bot more effective. I've built a boardbot like this - detail here https://yojava.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/agile-coaching-the-robots-are-coming/ All feedback welcome!

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