Agile Coach Journal

I got a valuable gift at Agile Open California during a workshop on Improvisational Comedy.  Read more…

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Agile software development is a big change for many organizations. The most typical pattern is to start with one or two small projects and then build on success with more projects. In time, a wider change in organizational process and culture is underway. If your company is about to take this journey into unfamiliar territory or if they have gone part way and are feeling a little uncertain about their current location in the Agile landscape, you should consider hiring an experienced guide. In the Agile world, this guide is called an Agile Coach. Here are some advantages of hiring a Coach to help you find the way. Read more…

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Earlier this year I was in an Open Space workshop about teaching games. We chose the Definition of Done as a game subject and started brainstorming ways to illustrate its importance. It was harder than we anticipated. Ironically, we ran out of time and did not finish our game about being done.

I did get one insight out of this exercise that I find useful in my teaching and coaching now. I average about two original thoughts per year so I am hanging on to this one with both hands. We started with the question “What does it mean to be done?”. This question was surprising difficult to answer. I closed my eyes, made a plea to the Muses, reached back into my life experiences of things completed in jobs, hobbies, school, chores. I gathered up the feeling that was common to them all. And this emerged:

“Done” means that I don’t have to think about it anymore.

This post is done.

Popularity: 40% [?]

In my early Agile days, we did not have a formal Definition of Done. We went by feel. If we were happy with the implementation from a design standpoint, if the story did what the Product Owner asked for, if it was fast enough for the user and if we did “enough” testing, then it was done. Since then, experience has suggested the need to be more precise about the criteria for “done”. It helps us to get agreement from all interested parties. Read more…

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Collaboration is fundamental to successful agile projects. A team of people working together toward a shared goal will create a different product than a group of individuals working alone on parallel assignments to be integrated later. Collaboration supplies automatic load balancing, constant discussion and generation of new ideas and communication on the status of the work. A goal for successful agile practice is to foster collaboration in the team. There is much in the literature about how to do this, nicely summed up in Jean Tabaka’s great book,Collaboration Explained.

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This is the substance of the lightning talk I gave at the Agile Coach Camp, for what it is worth. I put it together as a way to summarize my personal goals for the conference.

Pretty much all of us became agile coaches by accident. None of us went to school to learn how. There are no such schools. Some of us were more deliberate about choosing this career path than others, but it was largely circumstantial for most of us as this new field emerged. And, so far, there are no public training opportunities for agile coaches. 

Two of the cornerstones of Agile software development are continuous improvement for teams and constant feedback at many levels to stay on track. In this spirit, should we coaches also desire feedback on our efforts and seek to improve our own performance? I think so. Sure, we get better with each day of practice and we learn as we go, but are their ways to be more deliberate about it? Here are some to consider. 

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