Customer Reviews

Agile Coaching

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There was a time when software developers worked with consultants that will do things for their company or teach some technical knowledge. Agile approaches have brought forward another type of people: coaches. According to Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, a coach doesn't tell you what to do, rather she shows you how she thinks you might do things and hope that it will help you to improve your situation. She leads by example. It is not easy to write a book on this type of topic. The authors recognize this situation and manage to achieve a good balance between general advice and practical usage reports.

The first part of the book is concentrated on the basics of coaching and communicating in software project. The software development curricula are often weak on "people" skills and you are not always lucky to find the right person as a supervisor when you get out of school. The second part goes through the different activities of a typical Agile project (daily meeting, user stories definition, planning, etc.) and discuss how coach can help a project team to achieve its goals. Each chapter has a final checklist and the book is also full of "personal stories" from the authors that enhance the theoretical advice, applying it on real situations.

Although the title of the book and some of its content might make you think that its value is limited to an agile context, I will recommend this book to every person that has some supervision function in software development organizations and to every developer who believe than acquiring additional "people" skill might improve its work environment. Just changing the way you talk with colleagues could lead to having more sunnier days at the office.

I echo Yves' statement in that I wish I had this book when I started out coaching teams. The book covers all the bases to get started as a coach.

For coaches like me who have a few years' experience, some sections might seem dry, but overall you will gain insights in many areas. The PrOpER (Problem, Options, Evaluate, Review) model for deciding what to do in a situation is an example of something I learned. Overall, I feel that Agile Coaching helps me go to a deeper level on the practices I am already using, as well as teaching me about technical practices less familiar.

The book is an easy read, organized so you can dive into the topics that matter most to you now and can be used as a quick reference later.

My road to learning how to be a more effective coach involved scouring posts and articles online, discussing in mailing lists and talking to other coaches. Agile Coaching is a one-stop shop, packed with practical advice, examples to work from and stories from the trenches.

This is a rather thin book that is a quick read. I like the cover art that was chosen for this book. Rachel and Liz did a great job of sprinkling little stories throughout the book to provide relevant examples that provided good context for the current topic.
I really enjoyed the first part of the book that focused on working with people, leading change, and building teams. The middle part of the book was a bit basic, but I won't judge harshly because the organization I work at has a fairly mature (6 years, 4 teams) adoption of Extreme Programming, so this part of the book was good review. It would be more valuable for someone who is trying to introduce teams to agile software development for the first time. The last part of the book was very good, it covers topics such as listening to feedback, helping teams reflect, and growing yourself.
I wish this book would have dealt more with 1-on-1 coaching and provided some insights/stories for "player coaches." I'd like to see a more advanced edition of this book for organizations who have a mature agile adoption and are looking to grow their own coaches.

As a non programmer I was not looking forward to wading through another Agile book, but was pleasantly surprised to find it full of sensible advice for "normal" people. I've found a lot of great ideas, many common sense ones, which I can use to help institute our fledgling Agile practices. Many of the techniques suggested fit with educational practices, and which, from long experience as a teacher have proved to have worked. I'm recommending it to the Agile "drivers" in our business.

Agile Coaching, in my opinion, isn't only for people who coach agile teams. If you're in the software business, you'll learn something valuable from this book. Start with the last chapter - "Growing You". The only way to succeed in our industry is to continually learn and improve, and this chapter gives great suggestions how to do that.

This book is a model of concise, clear writing. It's packed with information in the form of narrative, bullet points, graphics, photos, stories of real teams and projects, exercises, tips and examples. The authors have been walking their talk for a long time, so you can feel confident about following their advice. Their flair for language makes the book fun to read. It could be a quick read, except you'll find yourself stopping to reflect on your own experiences, and thinking about how you could apply the technique you just read about on your own team. Each chapter includes hurdles you may face, and a checklist summarizing action items for you, the reader.

I particularly enjoyed the little vignettes with dialog from a typical team illustrating topics such as "Not Quite Done Yet" and "Getting Ready to Demo". The authors have insight into all aspects of coding, testing, and managing software teams. You'll find advice you might not expect in a software-related book, such as "Be kind to yourself". The focus on people and teams will make you a better person and team member.

Most of the books in the Agile space cover the mechanics of how to organize teams and groups of teams. A few of the books talk about human beings. Finally we have a book were the humans are front and centre. In this case that human is the coach - but I'm going to suggest that not only coaches - but many others would benefit from reading this book. Basically if you work on an Agile team and want to better understand the human dynamics - this is a good place to start.

I've been coaching for over 3yrs now and wish I'd had this book when I started down this path. I would have made many fewer mistakes.

Caveat Emptor: I consider myself a friend of the authors and received a free copy of the book. I can promise that this didn't influence my review.

There was a time when it was believed that software development methodologies were a set of tools that could be taught and explained on their technical merits alone. Two decades ago when I was involved in the adoption of Knowledge-based and Rule-based Systems in a large Insurance Company it was thought that successful adoption of a new software methodology was a largely technical process that must be learned as a particular set of skills. Explaining what Team-based development Methodologies are, and their successful implementation requires much more than that. Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley describe and illustrate the Team Collaboration, Communication and Coaching Techniques that will insure the success of Agile and Lean Methodologies. They provide clear examples of the issues and methods of achieving clear communication and team buy-in. Illuminating and informal stories and pictorial illustrations are given that will ensure clear communication, Socratic/participatory learning and team member partcipation. They illustrate what it means to be a successful coach in Agile Methods and all team-based technology learning. I highly recommend this succinct guidebook.

--Ira Laefsky
Senior IT Consultant Arthur D. Little and Digital Equipment Corporation
MSE/MBA

Disclaimer: This review contains lots of joy.

Agile Coaching is an absolutely __amazing__ book. If you're reading these reviews trying to determine whether or not you should purchase this book, I'll tell you now: BUY IT IMMEDIATELY!

This book should be read by every developer even vaguely familiar with the word 'agile'. It contains practical advice and implementation strategies for making agile work for you, __really__ work for you.

There are so many misconceptions about agile floating around. There are tons of books on the subject, but it's rare to find a book (or any resource, really) that fully explains not only the agile mindset, but how to apply agile practices to your work life, and personal life. I've read numerous books on agile over the past few years, and this has been by far the best in terms of usefulness. Why? It doesn't go into development details (how to setup tools, etc.), instead it focuses on the organizational and personal implementation of agile, so that you can successfully apply agile practices at work and in your personal life to make your team and yourself more effective at what you do.

Now, onto the actual review!

The book is broken up in various chapters, which should ideally be read from start -> finish to fully absorb all the topic material. The book is relatively short (just over 200 pages), so it can be read in a couple days.

Chapter Breakdown
=================

- Introduction

Coaching Basics
---------------

- Starting the Journey
- Working with People
- Leading Change
- Building an Agile Team

Planning as a Team
------------------

- Daily Standup
- 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

The chapters are direct, and contain personal stories of the two authors that describe various real-world scenarios they've ran into regarding the subject.

Each section has a 'Hurdles' part at the end, which describes various hurdles you may need to overcome and how to do so. There's also a 'Checklist' part at the end of each section which contains a list of things to do to ensure that agile is being properly implemented and working as expected. These lists are great resources for quickly flipping back from time to time.

What I really like about this book is its extreme usefulness. I'm currently in the process of converting a non-agile development team (of which I'm the lead developer) to a more agile group, and it is a hard task. Reading this book has clarified lots of difficult questions I've had for a while, and made the entire process much more transparent.

Reading through this book gives you not only a great introduction to agile (in-depth), but also leaves you with real advice for making it work for you. The book is short and fun to read, and will help you grow as a developer (and person).

In short: if you're a passionate coder, you **need** to read this book. It's awesome.

AGILE COACHING tells how to work with people to create Agile teams to build software, showing how to grow a team that is self-sufficient and skillful. From Test-Driven Development design to real-world experiences with real teams, this offers chapters applying agile techniques to everyday objectives. Computer and business collections alike will relish this.

My manager let me borrow his copy of Pragmatic Programmer's Agile Coaching. I've read a good number of Agile process and management books. I'm partial to the Pragmatic Programmer publishers due to their consistently well-written books. I also started using stickies instead of pens/pencils when I read my books. Mainly because they stand out better and allow me to find my notes quicker. The other reason is because I can remove them when I give the book away (which I've done a good deal lately. Of course, not with this book since it was my boss'). The stickies I use are these and can be found at most office stores.

Anyways, back to the book. The authors, Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, do a good job explaining the different ways to start/continue agile coaching. The format of the book, multiple sections relevant to the chapter, Hurdles, and Checklist, worked very well for me. They share their experience, pain points, and give you a list that you can contain in your short-term memory.

I enjoyed reading this book because it made me, once again, focus more on the people aspect of software development and less on the coding. I haven't focused much on that part because I've assumed the people I work with are all professionals. Unfortunately, I've forgotten that they are human, too and need to be approached as humans and not machines. I'm still convinced that all software developers are control freaks. Our computer does what we tell it to. If it doesn't, it is usually our fault.

I highly recommend this book.