Agile coaching for Scrum software development teams
As stated in the Agile Manifesto, Agile software development is about “Individuals and interactions”. The importance of having a performing team where individuals collaborate is an essential factor for the success of software development projects. In his “Forming Agile Teams Workbook”, Jesus Mendez provides some tools that offer an alternative-proven way to add more structure, transparency and visibility to formation of Agile teams.
Written by South African Agile coaches Samantha Laing and Karen Greaves, “Coach’s Guide to Agile Requirements” is a book on how to teach the concepts of Agile requirements. It provides a complete plan to run a workshop where people can learn how to elicit, refine and organize requirements in an Agile way.
In his book Agile Reflections, Robert Galen has aggregated multiple articles that he wrote about transitioning to Agile for the online publication PM Times. The book is based on his experience as in Agile coach helping companies in different phases of their transition to Agile software development.
Enterprise agility is both a hugely popular aspiration and a widely misunderstood buzzword. Many of us as Agile coaches wonder how we can lead and catalyze agility at an organizational level. Our intentions are earnest, but our skills and understanding are partial. This talk explores what Agile coaching across an enterprise means, from an executive’s leadership maturity to the limits of culture, from organization structures to value creating processes.
Retrospectives are certainly one of the most important techniques used in Scrum as they form the foundation of the continuous improvement and adjustment to the context for the Scrum team. It is however not always easy to facilitate this activity with a bunch of software developers that are often mostly introverted.
When you observe a well-knit team in action, you’ll see a basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going on all the time. Team members sit down in pairs to transfer knowledge. When this happens, there is always one learner and one teacher. Their roles tend to switch back and forth over time with, perhaps, A coaching B about TCP/IP and then B coaching A about implementation of queues. When it works well, the participants are barely even aware of it. They may not even identify it as coaching; to them, it may just seem like work.
When your organization is thinking to adopt Scrum or is just beginning to use it, there are always questions that people will ask about how Scrum really works. As an independent Agile Coach, Roger Brown has collected 85 of them that he has arranged under major topics like people or technology.
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