Agile Coaching is a practical guide to creating strong agile teams and demystifies agile practices, to discover how to use agile coaching skills and coach your teams to become more Agile.
Summary
Title: Agile Coaching
Author: Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley
Themes: Agile, Career, Cases, Technology, Management
Year: 2009
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
ISBN: 1934356433, 9781934356432
Pages: 221
Agile Coaching by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley is an essential guide for professionals who want to learn the skills and techniques necessary to effectively coach agile teams.
To lead change, you need to expand your toolkit, and this book gives you the tools you need to make the transition from agile practitioner to agile coach.
Agile Coaching is all about working with people to create great agile teams. You'll learn how to build a team that produces great software and has fun doing it. In the process, you'll grow a team that's self-sufficient and skillful.
This book provides you with a deeper knowledge of how agile practices work and how to inspire your team to improve.
Discover how to coach your team through the agile lifecycle, from planning to writing software, and learn the secrets of running effective agile meetings and how to get your team to follow a consistent approach to creating software.
Find out what works and what to avoid when introducing agile practices to your team.
Featuring easy-to-follow steps, the book provides readers with the tools and strategies needed to successfully coach and mentor team members, foster collaboration, and increase productivity.
My Book Highlights:
"... During stand up meeting, make sure each team member is reporting to the team and not to one individual in particular. This is not a status reporting meeting but an opportunity for the team members to coordinate their day's work. At Insidr, we have the scrum master take notes during the meeting and it can very easily devolve into each member reporting status to the scrum master, each in turn, while nobody else pays attention. This is the opposite of what the stand up meeting is meant to be..."
"... Have the stand up meeting at the task board, or bring the task board to the stand up meeting. The meeting is more meaningful if the tasks being discussed are right in front of everybody..."
"... Approach reading a book like building a jigsaw puzzle: peruse all the pieces, find the edges, work out the easy parts of the interior, and keep the most difficult pieces for last. When dealing with a book, scan all the headings and illustrations to get the overall message, then read the parts that provide the overall structure, skipping hard passages to focus on breadth over depth, then coming back to parts of interest..."
The authors draw on their extensive experience to provide readers with actionable advice and real-world examples that are essential for successful coaching.
Some key insights and learnings from the book include:
- Become an effective agile coach and mentor.
- Identify and address team dysfunctions.
- Foster collaboration and trust between teams.
- Encourage continual learning and improvement.
- Use effective facilitation techniques to ensure successful meetings.
- Utilize agile principles to increase team engagement.
The authors cover many situations that can occur with teams new to agile and some ways to get them past obstacles.
Throughout the book the authors share their personal coaching stories from experience with real teams, giving you insights into what works and what to avoid. Each chapter also covers hurdles that you and your team may face and what to do to clear them.
Chapters of the Book:
1. Starting the Journey
1.1 What Does an Agile Coach Do?
1.2 Developing a Coaching Attitude
1.3 Getting Ready to Coach
1.4 How to Start Coaching
1.5 Maintaining the Pace
1.6 Hurdles
1.7 Checklist
2. Working with People
2.1 Listening
2.2 Giving Feedback
2.3 Resolving Conflicts
2.4 Building Agreement
2.5 Hurdles
2.6 Checklist
3. Leading Change
3.1 Introducing Change
3.2 Asking Questions
3.3 Encouraging Learning
3.4 Facilitating Meetings
3.5 Hurdles
3.6 Checklist
4. Building an Agile Team
4.1 Helping a Team Jell
4.2 Creating a Team Space
4.3 Balancing Roles
4.4 Energizing the Team
4.5 Hurdles
4.6 Checklist
5. Daily Standup
5.1 Standing Up
5.2 For the Team by the Team
5.3 Handling Issues
5.4 Setting the Time
5.5 When to Coach
5.6 Hurdles
5.7 Checklist
6. Understanding What to Build
6.1 Life Cycle of a User Story
6.2 Encouraging Conversations
6.3 Working with Cards
6.4 Confirming the Details
6.5 Hurdles
6.6 Checklist
7. Planning Ahead
7.1 Preparing for Planning
7.2 Understanding Priorities
7.3 Sizing the Work
7.4 Review and Commit
7.5 Keeping Track
7.6 Hurdles
7.7 Checklist
8. Keeping It Visible
8.1 The Team Board
8.2 Big Visible Charts
8.3 Maintaining the Team Board
8.4 Hurdles
8.5 Checklist
9. Getting to “Done”
9.1 Who Does the Testing?
9.2 Defining What “Done” Means
9.3 Planning in Testing
9.4 Managing Bugs
9.5 Getting Feedback Early
9.6 Recovering from Not Getting Done
9.7 Hurdles
9.8 Checklist
10. Driving Development with Tests
10.1 Introducing Test-Driven Development
10.2 Continuous Integration
10.3 Sustaining Test-Driven Development
10.4 Hurdles
10.5 Checklist
11. Clean Code
11.1 Incremental Design
11.2 Collective Code Ownership
11.3 Pair Programming
11.4 Hurdles
11.5 Checklist
12. Demonstrating Results
12.1 Preparing for the Demo
12.2 Everyone Plays a Part
12.3 Releasing the Software
12.4 Hurdles
12.5 Checklist
13. Driving Change with Retrospectives
13.1 Facilitating a Retrospective
13.2 Designing a Retrospective
13.3 Broader Retrospectives
13.4 Hurdles
13.5 Checklist
14. Growing You
14.1 Ways to Grow What You Know
14.2 Making a Plan
14.3 Building Your Network
14.4 Personal Reflections
14.5 Getting Comfortable
14.6 Checklist
In conclusion, Agile Coaching is a must-read for professionals who want to learn the skills and techniques necessary to become an effective agile coach.
With its comprehensive approach, the book offers valuable insights into agile methodology and provides readers with the tools they need to become successful coaches and mentors.
By leveraging facilitation techniques and encouraging continuous learning and improvement, readers can foster
Rachel Davies provides expert coaching to teams in Agile software development techniques, such as Test-Driven Development and planning with User Stories. She has been working with Agile teams using XP and Scrum since 2000.
Liz Sedley is an Agile Coach and .Net Developer working in London, UK. She has fifteen years of industry experience, mostly as a C++ / C# developer. Liz has spent the last four years enabling companies to be more Agile.
I am incredibly grateful that you have taken the time to read this post.
Your support and engagement mean the world to me, and I truly appreciate your interest in the topics I write about.
I hope that you have found this post informative, educational and engaging.
If you are interested in reading more of my work, please visit other articles here on the website.
I promise to continue providing valuable and high-quality content for your enjoyment and education.
Thank you again for reading and I hope to see you soon!
Here are some related articles you may enjoy:
There are even more good things I've prepared for you!
Subscribe below or click here to receive new posts in your Email!
Do you want to read some book notes and recommendations? Discover more here!
Do you want to have amazing weekly content curation? Discover more here!
Ready to make a positive impact?
Support my work by sharing my content with your network.
Your simple act of kindness can reach new heights and help spread valuable information.
Want to show your support in a tangible way? A virtual coffee is a small but mighty way to show your appreciation and give me the extra energy to keep crafting valuable content!
