Product Description

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 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. Learn the secrets of running effective agile meetings and how to get your team following a consistent approach to creating software. You'll find chapters dedicated to introducing Test-Driven Development, designing Retrospectives, and making progress visible.

Find out what works and what to avoid when introducing agile practices to your team. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78483 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

About the Author
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. Rachel is internationally recognized in the agile community, a frequent presenter at industry conferences worldwide, and a director of Agile Alliance.

Liz Sedley is an Agile Coach and .Net Developer working in London, UK. She has fifteen years industry experience, mostly as a C++ / C# developer. Liz has spent the last four years enabling companies to be more Agile.

Customer Reviews

Advice from the code-face
For me the book is a book of two halves. As you would expect half of it is about coaching Agile teams. In that you'll find that it covers similar ground to my own Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile - both are about introducing change. While I cover more management and background they cover more personal stuff.

The other half of the book is a nice, modern, discussion of how Agile teams work. Its not Scrum, Kanban, XP or any other method. It describes what you find. Its one of the best introductions to current Agile practices you'll find. Plus, it incorporates a lot of experience which earlier books couldn't.

One of the things I liked about this book is the "corner cases." This book covers those bits of the Agile development process which sometimes get skipped over. For example: the advice to keep your white boards mobile, something I always do but until now nobody has ever put it in a book.

There are lots of other great tips from two people who are in the trenches coding and helping people develop better software and systems.

Not just a book for coaches
This book is the result of many years spent coaching teams to be agile, and the cumulative experience really shows.

There's a great emphasis on the pragmatic application of agile practices, and plenty of real-world examples and stories.

But it's is not just a book for coaches - anyone who works in an agile team will find lots here to help with understanding the process more deeply.

If you're just starting out with agile, it's a great way to learn what it might feel like to be in a well-functioning agile team.

And for those who have been doing it for years, there are fresh ways to look at the process, and some inspirational advice for when times are rough.

A much needed book about a very important practice
Coaching. How hard can it be? To the uninitiated a great coach hardly seems to do a thing: a small comment here, a gentle prod there. The result, the subjects magically improve.

Of course the truth is that there's no such thing as magic, and that coaching is a skill (maybe an art) that takes years to perfect. As others have said here, Agile has internalised the vital role that coaches can play, and as it grows in popularity there are going to be more and more people trying to coach, without knowing where to start.

This book is perfect for them. It's packed full of tips, snippets, pauses for thoughts, techniques, and most importantly stories. It can get a nascent coach started on the right road.

Vitally, it talks not just about practical application, but more importantly about the frame of mind a coach needs to have. Given a bad coach is perhaps more damaging than a good coach is helpful, helping them focus on the way they act is a fundamentally important part of the book's message.

Finally, more experienced coaches will get plenty from this book, too (I know I did); Whether in the form of revisiting known techniques, discovering new ones, or apropos reminders of the aforementioned mindset.

I don't know of any other book aimed at Agile coaching. Great stuff, and much needed.