Agile Coaching

By Liz Sedley, Rachel Davies (2009)

What a team needs from you is guidance on what they can do and a show of courage to make these changes a reality.

My Notes

• Stand-ups in front of the sprint board
• Show/demonstrate (rather than tell)
• Grow a team that thinks for itself
• Frame change as an experiment
• Don’t repeat information for latecomers, sends message it’s okay to be late
• Create charts for things the team wants to address (e.g., pairing ladder)

Agile doesn’t work well when a pool of people working in several projects try to apply Agile as if they were a single team. Agile assumes one project at a time.

Productivity will not improve by wishful thinking and ‘trying harder.’ At worst, it plummets under excessive pressure.

Whatever the project pressure, try to keep calm yourself and not add to the pressure on the team unnecessarily. Your mood can rub off on the team and affect then even if you don’t want it to affect them.

Refactoring is not try aesthetic organisation of the code… it’s basic housekeeping.

Questions from “Quiet Leadership” (David Rock),

• How often have you been thinking about this problem?
• How often do you think about this?
• Are you satisfied with the amount of thought you’ve given the problem?
• Can you spot any gaps in your thinking?
• What insights are you having?