Welcome to The Survival Guide for New Agile Coaches

So, you know this Agile Software Development thing pretty well now. You've done it on a number of projects and have experienced the highs and fallen in the potholes. You've now moved on to a new group or company, and they want to "go Agile". Since you're the local expert, you've been volunteered to be the Coach. Congratulations, you're the dog who actually caught the car!

There are plenty of books out there about Agile Software Development in general, and some on Coaching in particular. The coaching books are excellent - I've read both of them - and there are dozens of books to read to educate yourself on Agile/Scrum/Lean in general, or on specific topics such as Estimation and Planning, Clean Code, etc.  You could literally spend months doing nothing but reading.  However, you don't have months... you don't have weeks... in fact, you're lucky if you have days!  So what can you do?

Well, this guide is somewhat different. It assumes that you know Agile already, and won't delve into the minutiae of the principles and practices unless warranted by the example at hand.  What the examples will do, though, is distil specific issues that commonly occur while coaching Agile teams into small lessons that you can easily read and apply in a short period of time.

These examples use the metaphor of our progression through the stages of life to provide a backdrop for a team's journey towards Agility, and your journey as a parent... er, I mean Coach. Anecdotes provide the context for a particular point, and concrete examples give you strategies for working through those situations, and even entire stages in a team's "life".

Life Stages
A team's progression during a transition to an Agile Software Development approach can be roughly equated to the following stages of a person's life:

• Prenatal
• Infant
• Toddler
• Preschooler
• Elementary School
• Adolescent
• Teenager
• Young Adult
• Mature Adult

It's not a perfect model, but that's the beauty of models - none of them are perfect. That's why they're only models! We're going to examine each of these stages through anecdotes and advice as a team progresses from their nascent beginnings to full maturity.

So, again, welcome to your journey into the world of an Agile Coach!