InfoQ Homepage Coaching and Mentoring Content on InfoQ
-
How to Audit an Agile Team
Stakeholders of an Agile project often seek the help of a seasoned Agile coach to gauge the effectiveness of the Agile process and practices that their team is following. The intention is to plug the holes and make the team more effective. Recently, on the Scrum Development group, Scott Killen started a thread on how to do an audit on an Agile team.
-
Scrum Gathering: Community of Practice
The Agile community is developing consensus around three important areas of practice: requirements gathering, agile coaching, and open space formats for group learning. At the recent Scrum Gathering, these topics were prominent topics of discussion on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 of the event. InfoQ explored each of these further to gain a better understanding of their place in Agile.
-
Do We Need an "Agile Team Lead" Role?
Patrick Wilson-Welsh, Chris Beale, Gary Baker, John Huston, Daryl Kulak, and others are attempting to popularize the idea of a new role, the "Agile Team Lead", to supplant many of the existing leadership roles found in and around agile teams.
-
Looking Inward To Stop An Agile "Decline And Fall"
Discussions about agile's "decline and fall" have been a somewhat recurring theme here on the AgileQ, and in the community in general, centering around sentiments that people aren't adopting agile effectively, that they're doing it wrong and screwing it up. Kevin Schlabach poses the idea that the agile community itself, by not growing new leaders, has a hand in causing this.
-
Top Ten Tips for An Agile Coach
Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, co-authors of the book Agile Coaching, gave a fun session “Top Ten Tips for Agile Coaches”. The session could well have been called “Top Ten Things that Many Agile Coaches get Wrong”.
-
How to Transfer Knowledge in an Agile Project
Knowledge transfer is characterized by transfer of understanding, about a context, from one unit (individual, team, department, organization) to another. In a series of interesting experiments, Steve Bockman tried to figure out the best way to transfer knowledge in an Agile project.
-
Opinion: Agile Coaches Frequently a Source of Adoption Problems
Increasingly there are reports of initial success followed by failures with Agile adoption. Sometimes these problems are inadvertently caused by Agile coaches.
-
What is Velocity Good For?
A recent discussion on the ScrumDevelopment Yahoo! group discussed the different uses and misuses for velocity. Should velocity be used a metric for productivity? Should it be used for iteration planning? What about longer term release planning?
-
Agile In a Flash
Many people playfully credit the 3x5 index card as the "agilist's badge". In many ways though this is not an inaccurate or inappropriate; going through a stack of index cards is a often real hallmark of many agile activities. But what about using index cards to learn and remember agile? With their 'Agile In a Flash' project, Tim Ottinger and Jeff Langr want to help people do just that.
-
Lessons Learned from the UK Agile Coaches Gathering
Recently, a number of European Agile Coaches gathered in the UK to discuss their craft and share ideas. Attendees included: Rachel Davies, Mike Sutton, David Peterson, Plamen Balkanski, Keith Braithwaite, Duncan Pierce, .... They covered a diverse range of subjects: Effective Coaching Styles, Why Do We Coach? Self Organizing Teams, and others.
-
An Agile Blue Angels Team
Promoting, sustaining, and evolving agile practices in an organization requires expertise and experience. Initially, many companies bring in outside experts to help get things started. Laura Moore has described a model, based on the Blue Angels, which companies can use to develop and deploy internal experts.
-
Models of Apprenticeship
Uncle Bob Martin recently wrote about his experience with apprentices and what he considers key to progressing from apprentice to journeyman. He describes two hypothetical apprentices: Sam, a developer who has apprenticed with the same master and had the same year fifteen years in a row. Jasmine has changed jobs (and therefore masters) a number of times - growing her skills along the way.
-
Panel: BayAPLN Agile Expert Panel
During QCon San Francisco 2008, InfoQ and BayAPLN, a local group of Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), organized a panel comprised of Agile experts which answered questions from the audience. The panelists were: David Chilcott, Moderator, Polyanna Pixton, David Hussman, Sue Mckinney, Pat Reed.
-
Handling Your Team's "Rotten Apple"
Recently there has been an active discussion in the Scrum Development Yahoo Group about handling an "under-performing" team member. In the 130+ response thread, "Rotten apple in Scrum team", talk ranged from advice for the primary question, to talk of team morale and who manages it, to the classic debate of measuring individuals, to distinguishing whether a team is really a "team", and more.
-
A Journeyman's Pair Programming Tour
Corey Haines has embarked on a unique personal "Pair Programming Tour". Now three weeks into this innovative journey, Haines has posted video interviews revealing many of the unique insights he's gained about pairing, automated testing, and the evolution of a software craftsman while sharing the keyboard at the home-bases of Dave Chelimsky, Brian Marick, Uncle Bob Martin, and others.