Book Review: Agile Coaching (Davies/Sedley)

Due to the second part of the Snowpocalypse here in the Northeast (3-4 feet in less than 7 days!), I had the opportunity to work from home and catch up on some reading.

The first selection was "Agile Coaching" by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley. This book is part of the Pragmatic Programmers publishing series.

This is a great book with lots of modern concepts included. I was surprised to find notes on Kanban and Pomodoro included in sidebars since these concepts just became common/mainstream knowledge in the community in the last year. As a whole, the flow of the book and the ideas contained were well-organized and easy to absorb.

My only disappointment with the book is that I was hoping for a whole book on improving as a coach, but this was limited to the last chapter. The majority of the book was focused on various slices of agile and how to facilitate them. Because I was lucky with my entry into agile (I was mentored by great coaches from ObjectMentor), many of these thoughts had been planted in my head years ago. It was good to refresh them in a simple condensed fashion though.

Summary- I'm glad I have this book in my library. It may not have provided new information for me, but it is a great reference in times of stress when teams slip back into old habits. It provides a great reminder for me of things that I sometimes forget. More importantly, the book can be read in slices which makes it a great tool to hand to others to learn a specific concept. I think target reader should be anyone new to agile that is in a leadership role (note I didn't say management). I have a strong feeling that I may use this book heavily as a tool to provide insight for others.

Agile books to read...

A post was put up in the Agile Alliance requesting books to read to learn about agile. This was a pretty wide scope, and it resulted in a pretty broad list that continues to grow:

• Agile Coaching
• Agile Estimating and Planning
  
• Agile & Iterative Development by Craig Larman
  
• Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
  
• Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
  
• Agile Retrospectives
• Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams
  
• Clean Code
  
• The Art of Agile Development by James Shore
• Lean Software Development by Mary Poppendieck
• Making things happen
  
• Tale of Two Systems
  
• The Passionate Programmer
• Practices of an Agile Developer
  
• Scrum and XP from the trenches by Henrik Kniberg
• Suceeding with Agile by Mike Cohn
• User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development

Authors and topics-

• Kent Beck (XP, patterns)
• Mike Beedle (Agile, scrum)
• Arie van Bennekum (Agile, DSDM)
• Alistair Cockburn (use cases, crystal, etc.)
• Mike Cohn (agile, scrum, planning poker, etc.)
• Ward Cunningham (XP, patterns)
• Martin Fowler (enterprise design patterns, refactoring, uml, xp, etc.)
• James Grenning (planning poker, etc.)
• Jim Highsmith (time-boxing, agile development)
• Andrew Hunt (pragmatic, incremental development)
• Ron Jeffries (XP, etc)
• Jon Kern (agile development and PM)
• Craig Larman (Craig's been writing about IID/Agile for a long time)
• Brian Marick (I think agile testing - but I'm not familiar with his work)
• Robert C. Martin (Agile Principles, Practices and Patterns, etc.)
• Steve Mellor (not familiar)
• Mary Poppendieck (lean)
• Ken Schwaber (co-founder of scrum, buy all of his books)
• Alan Shalloway (design patterns, agile, lean+scrum, etc)
• Jeff Sutherland (co-founder of scrum)
• Dave Thomas (agile OOA/D)

Credit for this list goes to everyone that helped build it on the forum.