I have to admit that I don't follow Football news. However, this story caught my eye. When Nigel Atkins was terminated as manager at Southampton, he lefthis players with a positive message on the dressing-room wall before he cleared out his office. These nuggets of advice could be used by agile coaches too! I particularly like "Keep Looking to Improve" as it encourages us to keep our eyes and minds open to doing better than we are now. While at the same time having confidence in our ability to do the right thing. Continue reading

Larry Wall wrote in Programming Perl "We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." Laziness is defined as the quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. You don't have to work with a team for long to hear developers moan about the terrible legacy code they have to live with every day. Programmers clearly don't like to... Continue reading

In 1967 Melvin Conway submitted a paper called "How Do Committees Invent?" to the Harvard Business Review. HBR rejected it on the grounds that he had not proved his thesis: "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." He got the paper published a year later in Datamotion magazine and it you’d like to read the original it’s available on his website here -- Fred Brooks subsequently coined the name "Conway's Law" when he wrote about this idea classic book "The Mythical Man-Month". In his article,... Continue reading

People often ask me for tips on sustaining a career as an independent agile coach. My number one tip is try to think about the service you provide from the outside-in. I mean, as Dan North has used "outside-in" in BDD -- start by identifying valuable business outcomes, focus on doing what's necessary to achieve those outcomes by establishing acceptance criteria and deliver as you go. As Dan says taking this approach "helps us build software that matters" -- our code is built out to serve those outcomes which our customers find valuable. I'd add that taking a similar approach... Continue reading

The art of product planning is to uncover what you need to build to the best product you can with the resources available to you - it's a balancing act. What makes this challenging is that essential requirements are often missed along the way. We'd like to avoid making major changes to our products late in the day and risk compromising the quality and integrity of our product. Taking an agile approach enables us to deliver incrementally, realising value at the earliest opportunity. An agile approach also enables us learn from each delivery and use this feedback to make a... Continue reading

As an agile coach, I get the opportunity to observe many daily standup meetings. Often I see a team lead kick-off with a brain dump of everything they did yesterday including a summary of all the meetings, which they attended on behalf of the team. Lately I've been wondering if being the first person to talk sets the right tone. What signal does this give the team? The purpose of daily standup is not to account for time spent yesterday but to make a plan for today. Some things that happened yesterday may be important to consider but many are... Continue reading

Recently I've been helping teams outside Development apply some basic Agile practices. Our company was founded using XP at the core of our approach to software development. We've grown along with the success of our products and now have several departments with day-to-day work that does not involve the Development team (such as Finance, Infrastructure, and "People & Places" who combine HR and facilities management) interested in managing their work along similar lines. Rather than blasting these teams with Agile theory and principles, we're building things up slowly. We start with a simple sketch about how to make the work... Continue reading

I'm now working as a coach for two XP development teams at Unruly. One of the issues that we identified to from the start is retrospectives had become a little stale and in need of freshening up. Although I have plenty of facilitation experience, I would rather see the team members grow their own skills than for me to facilitate every retrospective. So I put out an invitation to all team members interested in learning about retrospective facilitation. Anyone interested in taking a turn at facilitating a retrospective of the other team (than the one they're currently in) gets personal... Continue reading

Yesterday, I attended a daily standup meeting run by a Scrum Master/Project Manager. He was holding a red marker pen and, as he went around the circle, he'd ask the developers what time was left as he wanted to be able to "burn down" each development tasks by crossing out the original estimate and putting time left. His focus was on whether the tasks each of them was working on would be finished rather than whether features were actually Done. If a developer said "Yes" then he'd say "Great!" When he got to the last developer, she said boldly "I... Continue reading

On Friday I was talking to Katie, she works in a department where teams are trying to apply Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). She hasn't been on Matt Wynne's BDD training workshop yet and is looking for some background reading to explain what it's all about. So I've put together this blog to explain what BDD is and pull together some links for further reading. What is BDD? The B in BDD stands for Behaviour, the desired behaviour of the software to be developed. The DD part stands for Driven-Development. BDD is an approach for building a shared understanding on what software... Continue reading

Being an Agile Coach is challenging in many ways. You have to balance many things (see Olaf Lewitz recent post Spotting the Balance) as you work with different teams and stay true to your own values. You are a catalyst for change, helping the teams you work with see how they can work differently and supporting them on their agile journey. To do this you will need a solid understanding of agile principles and plenty of experience in how to put them into practice. When Liz and I wrote our book on "Agile Coaching" we filled it with stories and... Continue reading

Some words of advice on when to write the acceptance tests for our user stories. Continue reading

Summary of summery events for Agile Coaches in UK Continue reading

As an agile coach, you're bound to encounter a few skeptics in the teams and organisations you work with. Although sometimes it seems that skeptics are doomsayers bringing a cloud of negativity to the team and it's tough to see ideas shot down before they've been given a chance. In my experience, skeptics are to be embraced. I've been coaching agile teams for a few years and had plenty of exposure to naysayers and cynics. What has surprised me is how many of former skeptics are now agile advocates. I started my own agile jouney as a skeptic about XP... Continue reading

A good craftsman needs to take care of his tools, to keep them oiled and sharp. As an Agile Coach, you don't have any obvious physical tools apart from your trusty notebook and pen (and perhaps some super sticky notes, index cards and markers in your bag). You are the diagnostic instrument that both senses and perturbs in coaching situations. You use your eyes and ears to notice what's happening. You trawl through your pool of past experiences to help identify underlying issues. You rely on your heart to empathise with people you work with and reflect your values in... Continue reading

One of the questions we explore in my "Agile Coaching Skills" training course is when to adapt your coaching style. I draw an arrow running from Directive to Non-Directive, like the middle arrow in the sketch below, to represent one important aspect of coaching style. I explain that the coaching style you adopt depends on the experience of the team members (topmost arrow) and your own experience (bottom arrow). A heavily directive approach would be one where people are firmly told to follow a specific set of agile practices, as in Shock Therapy popularised by Jeff Sutherland. There's no choice... Continue reading

Often I get called in to coach teams who have been trying to implement Scrum and are struggling to deliver on their commitments by the end of the sprint.They agree what features should be possible to get done but somehow things don't go to plan. It looks like the problem is testing but there's more to it than that. Well-known agile expert Jeff Patton illustrates the underlying reality using the following picture. He used this sketch in support of arguments people use for going to a Kanban style approach ( which also focuses teams on what Done means). One source... Continue reading

When we start work with a new team, we bring a fresh pair of eyes. We see many things that we'd like to improve and many problems to be addressed. Part of our job, as an agile coach, is to help the team to bring these opportunities and challenges into focus. Now we can work with the team to implement solutions that mesh well with the organization / context they find themselves in. In this blog, I want to share a technique that I use with teams to surface driving forces and barriers to an agile transition so together we... Continue reading

Today I ran a workshop ideas to explore how to slice epic-sized user stories at Redgate in Cambridge. I'm going to share some of what we covered with you in this blog. In my work as an agile coach, I find many teams applying Scrum are puzzled about user stories. I guess one reason is that this technique is from XP and so these teams may be missing some of the background. In "Planning Extreme Programming" by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler stories are defined simply as, "We demonstrate progress by delivering tested, integrated code that implements a story. A... Continue reading

Many people are now moving into agile coach roles and looking for ways to improve their skills. In response to this demand, I've developed an Agile Coaching Skills workshop aimed at practicing agile coaches, to compliment my "Agile Coaching" book. If you're interested, the next public workshops are in London on September 15th and Belgium on 17th. Training can give us a boost but there are still gaps to be filled as we grow into a new role. We need a way for agile coaches to support their ongoing learning without relying on trainers (who are few and far between).... Continue reading

Next week, I'll be involved in discussions over who gets the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask awards. I'm writing this blog to bust a few myths about the award and selection process. Despite rumors that the award is an "old boys club" selected by past winners, I've been on the committee from the start. I'm female and automatically out of the running, as a board director of Agile Alliance. The Creation Story We were nearing the end of an Agile Alliance board meeting, the day before Agile2005 conference was due to start in Denver. After a full-day retrospective, facilitated by Esther... Continue reading

We explain some techniques for building trust on agile teams in our Agile Coaching book. However, I continue to explore this topic, as I believe it's essential for agile coaches to master. As an agile coach, you want to build trust with the people on the team you are coaching. You also want to improve trust between individuals on the team (which is hard to do if the team doesn't trust you yet). This blog shares my latest thinking on how you can help encourage trust to grow in different situations. Since our book was published, I ran two workshops... Continue reading

So much of what is written about leadership is hogwash. There's no recipe to follow. It starts with you and a belief in yourself. A belief in new possibilities. A belief in your abilities to make changes in the world, and an appreciation that you can't do it all on your own! All you need to know about leadership you learned when you were a kid. Cast you mind back to a sunny afternoon hanging out with friends with nothing to do. You see the football out in the yard. "What about a game?" You look around at your pals.... Continue reading

My favourite Agile Manifesto principle is "Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done." As coaches, we naturally work with people helping them form cross-functional teams and install agile practices that drive iterative product development. How many of us throw our energy into improving the environment that people work in? Yes, most agile coaches know how important it is to setup a visual workspace, with cards on a board in the team space, as Xavier illustrates so well on his Visual Management blog. What more can we... Continue reading

The Open Volcano event was put together in less than 48 hours, when several agile luminaries found themselves stranded in the UK due to volcanic ash induced flight cancellations. Attendees were impressed by how well it turned out. Open Volcano isn't unique, Agile Open Space events are springing up all over the place. They're often low-budget events centered on a specific agile theme, such as: CITCON is about continuous integration and testing, Agile Coach Camp / Gathering explores coaching agile teams, SDTconf delves into simple design and test. You see Open Space Technology is the perfect match for Agile values.... Continue reading