Book: Rachel Davies - Agile Coaching

Everyone supporting agile teams has to read this book!

Authors: Rachel Davies, Liz Sedley

Title: Agile Coaching

Rating: highly recommended!

More and more developers and project managers suddenly have to take over the role of ScrumMaster these days. All our agile frameworks and methodologies are easy to learn and understand so people become facilitators, supporters, and coaches of an agile team--without knowing anything about how to do that effectively. 

This book covers many important aspects of coaching an agile team.

Starting with coaching basics the authors explain what it means to work as an agile coach. Why do I coach? Do I have the right attitude for coaching? What does it mean to work with people? How do I encourage change? How can I help building an agile team? These and related questions get answered in the first part of the book.

Part two describes a lot of coaching tips and practices related to the planning activities of a team. The reader gets answers to questions like: How can I facilitate daily standup and planning meetings? Is it really necessary to coach in daily standup meetings? How to support the team understanding user stories and backlog priorities? How to create the team board and increase visibility?

The third part takes care about quality: How to introduce test-driven development? How to introduce clean code? How to start with pair programming? How to define and get to "done"?

The fourth and last part of the book covers inspection and adaption practices: How do I demo working software increments? How do I facilitate a retrospective meeting? What can I do to get better as a coach?

A very helpful resource in this book are all the short experience reports of Rachel and Liz. Every chapter ends with a typical list of hurdles and contains a checklist so it's easy to do regular self-reflections of specific topics as an agile coach.

This is a really nice reference book on the ScrumMaster's desk to look up how to improve one's own coaching skills.