Agile Coaching

by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley

Discover how to coach your team to become more Agile. Agile Coaching de-mystifies agile practices—it’s a practical guide to creating strong agile teams. Packed with useful tips from practicing agile coaches Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, this book gives you coaching tools that you can apply whether you are a project manager, a technical lead, or working in a software team.

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.

• Errata, typos, suggestions

Releases:

• P3.0 2010/09/27
• P2.0 2010/03/24
• P1.0 2009/08/17
• B3.0 2009/07/13

Full Table of Contents

Foreward

Introduction

• Coaching Basics
  • Starting the Journey
  • Working with People extract
  • Leading Change
  • Building an Agile Team
• Planning as a Team
  • Daily Standup extract
  • Understanding What To Build
  • Planning Ahead
  • Keeping it Visible
• Caring about Quality
  • Getting to Done
  • Driving Development with Tests
  • Clean Code
• Listening to Feedback
  • Demonstrating Results
  • Driving Change with Retrospectives
  • Growing You

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.