InfoQ Homepage Coaching and Mentoring Content on InfoQ
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Beginner's Mind - An Approach to Listening
Beginner's Mind is the idea of approaching things without preconceptions, pre-conceived ideas or prior judgements. This approach is useful to agile practitioners and coaches, inviting us to enter situations and observe what is really happening before we act.
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Touchy Feely Impediments to Agile Adoption
Struggling with Agile Adoption? Amr Elssamadisy ran a session on what makes adopting Agile processes difficult. He provided the audience with three models for understanding the problems seen during adoption.
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Presentation: Developing Expertise: Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep
In this presentation made during QCon London 2007, Dave Thomas talks about expanding people's expertise in their domains of interest by not treating them uniformly as they had the same amount of knowledge and level of experience.
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Agile Coaches Attend First AgileCoachCamp
An Agile Coach is someone who helps a team, or an entire organization, adopt and improve their agile practices. AgileCoachCamp, held this spring in Ann Arbor Michigan, was the first ever conference specifically for agile coaches. The participants, who came from as far away as India, Sweden, and Ukraine, self-organized to put on more than 60 sessions during the open space conference.
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Retrospective Failures and How to Avoid Them
What are the typical problems that Retrospectives suffer from? What do we do to avoid them?
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What Might Happen if You Asked a Powerful Question?
Too often leaders, pressed for time, throw the easiest question at a team. But a moment's reflection, followed by a wise open-ended question can generate new possibilities when a team is stuck. This centuries-old educational technique, sometimes called "Powerful Questions," is a great tool for all team members, to transform "stuck" situations into learning opportunities.
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Are there weaknesses with Collective Code Ownership?
The Agile development community has been practicing Collective Code Ownership for long enough now that we had enough time to find some of the faults.
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Creating The Culture For An Agile Environment
Greg Smith offers an in-depth practical perspective on making your agile transition just as much about culture change as it is about process change.
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InfoQ Video: Practices of an Agile Developer
At NFJS Venkat Subramaniam, co-author with Andy Hunt of "Practices of an Agile Developer," shared his pragmatic approach to some of the important technical and non-technical factors contributing to project success, including: coding, developer attitude, debugging, mentoring and feedback.
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Well Formed Teams: Helping Teams Thrive, not just Survive
What does it take to create a high-performing team? According to Doug Shimp and Samall Hazziez, a "Well Formed Team" exhibits the following characteristics: follow Agile and Lean principles, use an adaptive system with a feedback loop, are focused on the business vision, are passionate and hyper-productive.
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Improving Productivity without Formal Metrics
Ron Jeffries has started writing a series of fictional stories based on his observation of real teams. The first story (Kate Oneal: Productivity) focuses on the character Kate O'Neal (CTO) and one of her teams "Rimshot". In this episode Ron explores achieving and measuring Productivity improvements without formal metrics.
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Apple Manager Writes "Managing Humans" to Help Techies
It’s Michael Lopp’s belief that developers are trained to manage bits well, but not humans. When developers are promoted to managers much harm can be inflicted. Michael uses stories and humour to warn us of the many perils of management and how to navigate around them.
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Are You An Agile Architect?
Vikas Hazrati recently posted an article on Agile Journal, defining his ideal characteristics of an Architect working in an Agile team, reflecting how the role of Architect has changed in light of Agile practices.
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Creating Better Metrics
A recent article in The Economist pays tribute to three of the finest graphics from the last two centuries. What can be learned from these graphics to improve the display and the quality of agile development metrics?
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The Role Of Leadership - Agile 2007
Mary Poppendieck spoke at Agile 2007 providing an insight into the adaptation of manufacturing management principles in the software development arena.