The false dichotomy of agile coaching - Lean Agile Scotland 2019

@sebrose http://smartbear.com
Seb Rose
The false dichotomy
of agile coaching:
process or technical?

Agenda
A dichotomy is born
Let’s talk about coaching
Technical reviews
Developer skills
A false dichotomy
Q & A

Conferences are splintering
and many
more

(process)
An Agile coach is a person who is responsible
for creating and improving Agile processes
within a team or a company.
https://www.toptal.com/project-managers/agile/what-is-an-agile-coach#targetText=An%20Agile%20coach%20is%20a,a%20team%20or%20a%20company
Agile coach

What is an agile technical coach?
An Agile Technical Coach (ATC) is someone
who has the experience and knowledge to put
their hands on a keyboard to show engineers
how to implement XP 12 practices, focus on
building-in quality, enforce SCM rules, among
their other agile coaching duties.
REALLY ???

Exercise 1:
- what skills should a technical coach have?

What is coaching
Coaching assists a client to bridge the gap
between where they are now, to where they
would like to be far more effectively than if
they worked alone.
https://www.the-coaching-academy.com/coaching/index.asp

A coach achieves this by:
• Helping to raise the awareness of a client with
powerful questioning techniques
• Assisting them to create practical, step-by-step
action plans to reach their goals
• Providing on-going support through any changes
or obstacles a client may encounter
• Providing a client with tools, techniques and
strategies to create lasting change and success
https://www.the-coaching-academy.com/coaching/index.asp

ACI framework
https://agileforall.com/understanding-acis-agile-coach-competency-framework/

Teaching
… is about teaching people something.
Typically teaching has some pre-deﬁned
outcomes or objectives.
This is where the … “expert” may live - telling
people how to do something.

Mentoring
… is deﬁnitely also focused on imparting
knowledge.

Facilitation
… is about holding that impartial stance. You
m a y f a c i l i t a t e t h e t e a m t h r o u g h a
retrospective, but you are impartial. Your goal
is to hold them to the agreed on guidelines,
but you do not have a speciﬁc expected
outcome.

Professional coaching
… is about being impartial to the goal. Coming
from professional coaching, you believe, truly,
that the team can solve the problems they
have. You work with them to help the team to
solve those issues and be their best selves.

Exercise 2: ﬁll in the table
Technical Business Transformation
Teaching
Mentoring
Facilitation
Professional
coaching

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/review

Design reviews
• Does the proposal make sense?
• How well does it align with strategic
direction?
• Have the right people been consulted?
• Are there unresolved disagreements?
Sample checklist

Code reviews
• Does the code make sense?
• Do the automated tests document the
behaviour?
• Does it conform to agreed standards?
• Are there structural weaknesses?
• Have dependencies been considered?
Sample checklist

Exercise 3:
- could you coach teams to do code reviews?
- if so, how?
- if not, why not?

Pair programming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming
… is an agile software development technique
in which two programmers work together at
one workstation. One, the driver writes code
while the other, the observer or navigator,
reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The
two programmers switch roles frequently.

Continuous integration
… is the practice of merging all developers'
working copies to a shared mainline several
times a day.
Extreme programming (XP) adopted the
concept of CI and advocates integrating more
than once per day – perhaps as many as tens
of times per day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration

Test driven development (TDD)
… relies on the repetition of a very short
development cycle: requirements are turned
into very speciﬁc test cases, then the software
is improved so that the tests pass. This is
opposed to software development that allows
software to be added that is not proven to
meet requirements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development

Exercise 4:
Pick one of these developer skills:
- Pair programming
- Continuous integration
- Test driven development
Create a checklist to seed your coaching
- use the Wikipedia link (or your
favourite search engine)

What if the team needs teaching?
https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/44232489@N02/33637962635

False dichotomy?
A false dichotomy is a dichotomy that is not
jointly exhaustive (there are other alternatives),
or that is not mutually exclusive (the
alternatives overlap), or that is possibly
neither.

False dichotomy?
A false dichotomy is typically used in an
argument to force your opponent into an
extreme position -- by making the assumption
that there are only two positions.

Exercise 5:
Look back at the skills you thought a coach
needed to do technical coaching.
- Have you changed your opinion?

False dichotomy?
Q. Are you an
agile process coach
or an
agile technical coach?
A. Neither! 
You’re an agile coach.

NEW TRACK:
Coaching Technical Skills For Less Technical Coaches
This track is for agile coaches and leads, both internal
and external, to learn how to participate in working
with teams to encourage Technical Practices without
having that technical expertise themselves.
Postscript

• There are a variety of coaching stances 
• Not all of them require deep knowledge 
• “Non-technical” coaches can help teams
improve their technical practices
Take aways

Seb Rose
 
Twitter: @sebrose
Blog: http:/cucumber.io/blog
E-mail: seb@smartbear.com http://bddbooks.com

The false dichotomy of agile coaching - Lean Agile Scotland 2019

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The false dichotomy of agile coaching - Lean Agile Scotland 2019