Steven Mak is an Agile Coach of Odd-e team. He is interested in every part of software development activities and a variety of programming languages, from mainstream to the very exotic. He considers code quality very important as this is what fundamentally the programmers are working on and also what software company is delivering. At the moment, He is focused on test-driven development, refactoring, continuous integration, and of course Scrum.

He begins interested in programming while he was in primary school. Later obtained a Bachelor degree in Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong. To pursue better understanding of teams, customers, and products, he completed a Master degree in Business Administration at Imperial College London.

Below is a list of coaching and consulting services Steven provides:

• Hands-on coaching: Technical Practices
Software delivery is now too short for traditional programming methods. Steven is passionate with technical excellence. He pairs with developers on various important technical practices, such as refactoring, Test Driven Development, Acceptance Test Driven Development, Legacy Code Refactoring, Mocking, etc. He helped teams taming legacy code under various platforms and languages, such as C, C++, Java, Javascript, C#, PHP, VB, Go, and some more exotic ones. If you have codes that you think you cannot write any tests, bring it on!


• Scrum and LeSS meetings Facilitation
Are your teams new to Scrum? or you have been running Scrum for a while but find the meetings boring? Utlising methods such as Focused Conversation, Consensus Workshops, Strategic Planning, Steven is experienced in design meetings for deep and focused dialogue. Not only he can help facilitate meetings for your teams, he also helps with new Scrum Masters on how to design meetings where people engage, and let voices from everyone be heard.


• Scrum Master and Product Owner Mentoring
As much as helping teams adopting agile practices, Steven helps new Scrum Masters and Product Owners on their new agile journey, as well as experienced ones who seek to perform at next level. Steven is experienced in these roles and provide context for helping and reflecting in order to help others perform better.


• Domain Modeling and Design workshop Facilitation
As hands-on developer, Steven helps teams on facilitating design and modelling workshop, including Event Storming, UML modelling, etc. The key is to help teams getting consensus and making decisions.


• Open Space for Agility
Engagement is a key factor for Agile Adoption. Steven is a holder of OSA-1 and helps organization adopting agilty with Open Space Agility method.

In addition to work, Steven is the organizer for Agile Hong Kong meetup, Agile Tour Hong Kong, and Agile Hong Kong Conference. He often serves in regional conferences as proposal reviewers. He speaks at local, regional, and international conferences, varying from agile-themed conferences to other conferences and meetups, including QCon Beijing, Regional Scrum Gathering, Agile Tour, PyCon, Open Source Software Conference, etc, to pursue his passion of spreading good ways of working to audience of different background.

In 2018-2020, Steven also serves as a member of Board of Directors of International Association of Facilitators (IAF), Hong Kong Chapter.

His speaking engagement include:

• Apr 2010 - QCon Beijing
• Aug 2009 - Agile Conference (Chicago)
• Nov 2010 - Agile Tour Bangalore
• Oct 2011 - Agile Tour Ho Chi Minh City
• Jun 2012 - Regional Scrum Gathering China
• Dec 2012 - Agile Tour Bangkok
• Dec 2013 - VXCon Hong Kong
• Mar 2014 - Hong Kong Open Source Software Conference
• Nov 2015 - Agile Tour Taipei
• Oct 2016 - Regional Scrum Gathering China
• Nov 2016 - Agile Tour Hong Kong
• Mar 2017 - OWASP Tech Day (Hong Kong)

---

He taught my colleagues how Scrum work, providing mentorship to our project manager on how to work with customers, and facilitate discussion with customers on how to work together using Scrum.

This in turn has an important impact for us working with a major customer where they require vendors to adopt agile, and equip us company-wide to work in agile manner for future projects.

Steven keeps remind us timely on a wide scope, not limited to programming nor product development, to think and check in agile. We value his consultancy very much.

Ben C., Managing Director

---

He guides us through product development and ideation process with agile. He facilitates discussion with customers and helps us reflecting what we want to prioritise hence identify MVP.

He also helped us setting up developer and design practices, and that guides our developers and product designers working together, instead working in silos.

Since we wish our product can be used as a part of Agile / Scrum development. He has led to conduct an user research to let our designer without real Agile/Scrum experience to think how to design the product to achieve the goal.

Ben L., Startup Founder

---