Agile @ DevelopMentor

I’m pleased to announce that I have entered into a partnership with DevelopMentor. For those who don’t know DevelopMentor they are one of the leading IT training companies in the USA and Europe. DevelopMentor are traditionally a tech-heavy company. Traditionally they offered hard corse courses in C++, C#, Java and so on. They have not so far offered anything for Agile development. Well thats were I come in.

The partnership is in two parts. First DevelopMentor are licensing some of my training material. The first of these is my Foundations of Agile Software Development using Scrum (a 2 day course.) This course is now available in the USA and Europe - and probably most other places if you ask nicely.

The second part of the deal is for me to deliver training to DevelopMentors clients. This will include the Foundations Course plus other courses, again in the UK, Europe, the USA and elsewhere.

For more details see DevelopMentor’s Agile courses see their website.

Initially DevelopMentor are launching with three courses: Foundations of Agile, Requirements with User Stories and Test Driven Development. The first public delivery is schedule for September when I will deliver the Foundations course plus the Requirements course over 4 days (22, 23, 24 & 25) in London.

If your are interesting in the public course get over to the DevelopMentor website quickly, within a couple of hours of them announcing the course they took the first bookings.

Actually, we expect most of the interest to come from companies wanting in house delivery of the course. I delivered the foundations course in Denmark a few weeks ago and got very good feedback from the class.

Agile FAQ - Kicking off another Agile team

I recently gave some coaching to a big, well known, UK company get an Agile team started. Its interesting, this team have a few novelties all of their own, I’ll blog about that some other time. But they also have all the same questions and doubts that other teams have.

So here is a kind of Agile FAQ, the questions this team asked which all teams seem to ask sooner or later.

Q: What do we do about work items that are too big to fit in one iteration?
A: We will break the work down. We will break business requests into developer tasks. We will implement the minimally marketable feature the business agree to. We will talk to the business customer about what is required, we will implement the smallest thing that will work. It might be new, it might take some time to get the hang of it but it is doable.

Q: Should we have longer iterations? (Because our work items are so large)
A: No, if you have doubts you should have shorter iterations so that a) you see problems sooner, b) you get more practice at breaking work down.

Q: How will I know what to do if I don’t write a technical design?
A: Design is good but do not do more than is needed. Writing a document can be a useful learning exercise but there are other, and faster, ways to do similar things. Technical designs are best done at the white board with a colleague. If you need to document technical knowledge then document it after you have written the code/done the configuration.

There is no place for architects and software designers who are removed from the team. Design and architecture will evolve over time so needs guiding. This means experienced designers need to be involved (preferably coding) with the team daily.

Q: How will the business know what we are doing if we don’t write a functional design?
A: The business will be working with the team in planning meetings and will be seen the work as it is delivered.

Q: How do we manage dependencies between tasks?
A: Identify them and order the tasks accordingly. If need be break them down further.

Q: What if the business wants us to do A and B but not C?
A: Then do A and B but not C. The business pays the bills. If you need to do C for technical reasons - such as system quality - then do it. Don’t do C if its a feature the developers thing is worth having but the business don’t prioritise.

Q: What if the business wants us to do A then B but it would be quicker to do B then A?
A: Explain that to the business but respect their final decision. If they want B sooner then do it first.

Q: What if there is something technical which the business don’t understand and we need to do? The business won’t let us!
A: Explain it in terms the business will understand - this might require some learning and practise.

Q: Shouldn’t we have a detailed plan for future Sprints?
A: There is no point; requirements will change, your knowledge and understanding will increase and you will be better at estimating later. Only plan the next sprint in detail, you can sketch the work beyond that but don’t spend a lot of time on it.

You might sketch out what you expect to do in future sprints in “Release Roadmap|” but remember this will change as you go. Keep the roadmap under review.

Q: Should I include testing a documentation in my estimates? Won’t that make the estimates too large?
A: Yes. If that is work that needs doing it should be included. Not to include it would start to build an additional, hidden, backlog of work. Equally the customer should see the real price of the work, not the price you want them to see with more to come. And if the project manager gets a shock then so be it.

Q: Doesn’t Agile invite scope creep?
A: Yes but in general I find scope reduces on Agile projects. I call it running Scope Creep Backward.

Agile Governance model

The online Technology Management journal has published an article by me entitled “A new governance model for agile work.”

In the article I argue that Agile based software development needs a new governance model. The old model, based on defined requirements is not applicable - simply because the requirements evolve when working in an Agile fashion. Instead a governance model based on the venture capital investment cycle is more appropriate.

Hitch Hikers, Dynabook, the FT and me

Anyone who bought this weekends Financial Times might enjoy my contributions to the letters page today. If you missed it, then I hope this brings a smile to your face. (The piece I was commenting on appeared last week.)

Agile Coaching from Liz Sedley and Rachel Davies

I used to regular review books on this blog, somewhere along the line I stopped doing it - too many other things to blog about I guess. Plus, while I still read a lot I find it hard to find books which say anything news.

And, I increasingly find I’m reading books before they are published. My friends Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley have been beavering away at their book on Agile Coaching for over a year now. I’ve been reviewing the drafts as they go and I’ve seen it change and improve over time.

The book, Agile Coaching is now available as a Beta download from the Pragmatic Programmers press and the print version will be out in August.

For me the book is a book of two halves. As you would expect half of it is about coaching Agile teams. In that you’ll find that it covers similar ground to my own Changing Software Development - both are about introducing change. While I cover more management and background they cover more personal stuff.

The other half of the book is a nice, modern, discussion of how Agile teams work. Its not Scrum, Kanban, XP or any other method. It describes what you find. Its one of the best introductions to current Agile practices you’ll find. Plus, it incorporates a lot of experience which earlier books couldn’t.

Anyway, the waiting is over see for yourself.

I'm on Software Engineering Radio

For those who don’t know Software Engineering Radio is a series of pod casts about, well, software engineering. It was founded by Markus Völter and most of the team are other German software engineers. Don’t worry, its all in English!

Markus and the team are very well connected so they get access to most of the best people in the field.

So, its with a little awe that I am now joining in this collected wisdom. Yes, you can here me talking about Software Development as Learning on Software Engineering Radio. If you’ve ever wondered just what I sound like now’s your chance to find out.

The interview was recorded months ago and focuses on the material in my book (Changing Software Development).

SE-Radio is a totally not for profit organization so you might like to make a small donation if you find it useful.

Hawthorne effect disproved

Interesting piece in last weeks Economist which suggests the Hawthone effect doesn’t stand up to analysis. (For good measure the Financial Times covered the same story over the weekend.)

For those who don’t know, the Hawthorne effect is named after the Chicago telephone factory were it was originally observed. The researchers suggested that the act of experimenting on people changed their behaviour.

Back in 1924 researchers changed the lighting at the Hawthone factory and observed productivity increased. Then they reduced lighting and to their surprised it increased again. The conclusion of the study is widely cited to show that when workers know they are experimented on their performance increases. Another spin on the research suggests it is when workers feel valued their performance increases.

Now it seems the original data has been re-analysed using modern econometrics techniques. What it actually shows is the workers were more productive at the start of the week (lighting changes happened on Sunday.)

(Have a look at the Economist piece or the research itself to understand the subtleties I’ve glossd over.)

Anyone who saw another Economist report from last year knows already that most published research is wrong. That study showed that most of the research published in the top journals is disproved within three years.

Which raises the question of whether less well known and influence journals are actually more reliable but lets leave that to one side for now.

Perhaps the only surprise about the Hawthone effect is that it took over 80 years to be exposed.

And what lesson are we to draw from what we now know?

Well, maybe, if workers are more productive at the start of the week then keep that first two or three days clear for core work. Push meetings such to the end of the week.

Time to end Foie Gras recruitment

I can never decide if I actually like foie gras as a food. The taste is always secondary to the thought of the force feed ducks. This production process has led to attempts to ban foie gras - as in Chicago a few years ago.

Personally I’d like to end a practice I’ve seen too many times in the software industry and which I’ve come to call foie gras recruitment.

Foie gras recruitment is the forced expansion of a development team beyond the ability of the team to absorb new people. It happens when an organization decides it needs more software produced and decides to do so by hiring lots of new developers.

For example, an internet company I worked with a few years ago. The company faced a rapidly expanding market and needed more from the development team. I was asked help them improve their development processes and practices (“get agile”). When I turned up on day-1 I found four new developers were starting that day and another the following week.

This was on top of the two new developers who had been hired two months previously. And as if that wasn’t enough the company was opening a US development office and had three new recruits starting there the following week.

Given that the original development team was only four strong that is more that is more than a 100% increase. Unfortunately it was too late for me to stop any of this, I just had to pick up the pieces.

This was not the first time I had seen this problem and I’m sure it won’t be the last. The reason why companies do this is because they feel the need to get more done. However the immediate effect of stuffing the development group with new people is to slow everything down. The more you force feed the group the greater the slow down. Hence foie gras recruitment.

Most developers know Brooks Law: “Adding developers to a late project will make it later.” This can be generalised as “Adding developers slows work down.”

This is because new developer need time to learn their way around the system, the tools, the process and practices. When they don’t know they have to ask. People need to tell them things. Those people are the current developers. So they get less done. The more people you hire the slower things go.

(A related problem is hiring just developers rather than a balance of developers, testers and BAs/Product Owners but we’ll leave that for another day.)

In my experience a new developer needs at least three months to become productive. In the book Organization Patterns of Software Development Jim Coplien and Neil Harrison suggest the figure is closer to one year.

I’m sure someone will say: “But if the business want that” or “If we really must deliver more we need more people” but the reality is: more means slower. It is one of those occasions were someone need to explain to “the business” that more isn’t what they think it is.

This gives rise to the latest Kelly’s Law of development: In the short term your development resources are fixed - they may only be reduced.

Of course in the long term you may need to increase your development team and you should hire new developers. The right way to do this a rolling programme of recruitment. Aim to hire, say, one new developer every six months.

The frequency with which you hire will depend on things like: your current team size (big teams can hire more frequently) and the structure, number and interdependency of the existing team(s).

In any company there will be some level of natural loss and you may well want to set you hiring level to allow for this.

In the short term, if you really need to improve your through put then you need to look inside the team at the process and practices and see what can be changed there. Even here it takes time to improve throughput.

So, good bye to foie gras recruitment, hello to a little and often.

Death and the Internet

Please forgive my slight departure from my usual posts on software development, Agile, patterns and so on. But I’ve had cause in the last month to think hard about what the internet means to us all.

I’m probably one of the last generation of Europeans to remember life without the internet. My first contact with e-mail was about 25 years ago when a friend and me looked after the school computers and got access to the first inter school e-mail system - The Times Network for Schools.

(Access didn’t last long once the school saw the phone bill. Just long enough for us to discover that none of the other local schools had not changed their default password.)

As my professional career has developed so has the internet. But I can remember time before the internet so I know the world could survive without it again. A different world yes but it would survive.

Last month the internet took on a dark side and my relationship with it changed. Death came to cyberspace.

I’ve been following the blog of that old school friend for a few years. Nothing that interesting but it felt like I was in contact with him. Then in late April his post read like this: “I am an alcoholic, I have been for nearly 10 years. At the weekend I attempted suicide. The police broke into my flat and saved me because someone saw my update on Facebook.” Presumably his Facebook updated read like “Dave is ... attempting suicide with pills and beer.” Since then he’s been blogging every few days about his attempt to give up drink.

Think about that. A suicide attempt on Facebook. A confession of alcoholism in a blog. A public dairy of a recover attempt.

Sure you could say it was a very big plea for help. Publicity for himself yes, and maybe it was self indulgent but it also a sign of how we live out lives.

Then yesterday, a Facebook message from someone I didn’t know. I though it was spam and almost ignored it but I didn’t. It was that friend’s sister. She wanted to tell me he’d died.

I’ve long thought e-mail was the worst possible way to give people bad news but I was thinking of news like “Your project is late” this is an order of magnitude more.

Facebook was probably the only way she had of finding me quickly and I’m glad she did. But that changes Facebook for me. Until last month Facebook was about friends, pictures, smiles and so on. Its now changed.

I guess its like the telegrams we used to get: “Regret to inform you Bill Smith passed away STOP.”

And what is the protocol here? Do I go and delete him from my friends list? Or do I leave him there Zombie like? How long do I leave his blog on my reader?

Who tells Facebook to remove his account? Do they need to see a death certificate?
How long does Blogger leave his blog there before it is deleted by some robot?

Web-Archive will always have his posts and the websites he created.

Gradually he’ll be removed from friends lists, links to his blog will be dropped and the great garbage collector in the sky will remove his cyber-soul.

For now Dave still lives in cyberspace, he just hasn’t posted for a few days. Soon it will be a week, then a month, then a year. He’s already left more of a life history than most people who have ever lived, and its far more accessible. In 500 year historians will have a better understanding of everyday life because of the likes of him.

A commenting policy

One of the things I really like about this blog is the comments. Firstly I get comments, secondly they are usually complementary and often provide additional information and understanding.

I moderate the comments but on the whole I publish everything I get. Once or twice I’ve published comments I find personally hurtful or miss the point. I’m not promising to keep this up but I will try to publishes everything.

However, what I will not publish is “spam” comments, I’e just rejected another one. Over the last few months I’ve got comments which say something like “Good blog” or “Nice blog entry” - i.e. they are short and not specific to my blog or any particular blog entry. Nothing wrong there except, usually the poster has included a link to their own website (or someone elses) and I have no other links for the poster.

I published the first one or two of these then realised they were not really commenting on my blog, they were placing a link to their own site.

I don’t mind people linking to a site in a comment provided its relevant, tells me more about the subject or the person who posted.

While comments of the form “Keep up the good work - you might like www.cheap-tickets.xyz” may support my ego they don’t add anything to the blog.

Secondly. As a general rule I don’t reply to comments, and I don’t promise to answer questions posted in comments. Sometimes I do but to reply to everything would be making too much work for myself.

Thoughts after Jeff Sutherland at ACCU London

Jeff Sutherland was back in London last week and was good enough to give a talk to ACCU London. As one of the organisers of the ACCU London events I feel I’m justified in giving myself (and my co-organiser James Slaughter) a well deserved pat on the back. This was something of a coup for us.

Over 80 people registered for the event - in fact there was a waiting list of people we couldn’t fit in - and I counted at least 70 people in attendance.

As this event was somewhat bigger than our usual events we had to find a bigger room. Fortunately JP Morgan came to the rescue with a room at the top of their London tower. So not only did we have Jeff but we had a great view of London. Thanks JP Morgan!

Jeff is a good presenter and had some interesting things to say. Although I know most of the Scrum-stuff I still picked up some good information. A few points I thought writing down:

• When Scrum was introduced at Palm it was found that 1 hour of postponed testing resulted in 23 hours of testing later.
• The Chaos reports from the Standish group find that 76% of requirements change after a project has started.
• Data from Yahoo shows that teams adopting Scrum on their own show a 35% productivity improvement. Teams which are coached through Scrum adoption shows a 300-400% improvement. Good news for those of us like me who make a living as an Agile Coach, usually with Scrum. (For those who want it the original source of this statistic is "Rolling Out Agile at a Large Enterprise" by Gabrielle Benefield at the Hawaii International Conference on Software System, 2008.)
• Not only does Jeff endorse the addition of XP technical practices (TDD, refactoring, pair-programming, etc.) to Scrum he believes these are what allow Scrum to scale up. This is important as it fits in with Bob Martin’s comments at the ACCU conference last month.

At the end of the session there was a very good Q&A session - so good we ran out of time and had to cut it short.

In response to one question Jeff mentioned a paper he wrote a couple of years ago called The Future of Scrum. What is interesting here is, Jeff foresees changes in the way Scrum is practices. This contradicts with Ken Schwaber’s statement that “There is only on Scrum.”

I don’t want to get into fighting about whether there is one Scrum, or a future Scrum or what ever. What I think is interesting here is that there are different views on the subject.

While the Agile community as a whole sometimes seems unable to agree on “what is Agile” the Scrum community seems steel like in their understanding of what Scrum is. The truth, for both groups, is somewhere between the two extremes.

The BCS Kingston & Croydon session

In March this year Kevin Rutherford and myself ran an interactive session for Kingston & Croydon BCS at Kingston University.

Immo Hueneke who organised the evening has now done a write up of the evening with photographs. The session demonstrated and discussed the Theory of Constraints, Lean and a little on the Kanban development method.

What architects do

I stumbled across a programme called English Heritage on BBC 2 last night (Friday 15 May). Enjoyable for three reasons: first it was an insight into the work of English Heritage, second it was about renovation of Kings Cross station but while both of these were interesting the what I found fascinating was; third - the work of architects.

That’s physical, building, architects. Not the software engineering type.

Like many others in the software engineering community I’ve been guilty in the past of throwing the architectural metaphor around without really understanding what building architects do. Sure I know a little but much of what I think they do is guesswork.

So this programme grabbed my interest because it showed real architects at work. Here are some points that stood out to me:
• Work had begun on the project and the architecture plans were far from complete. Design was continuing and evolving as work continued.
• There was a budget and work had to be within the budget. It looked like the budget (and I suspect time) was set and design and construction occurred within that budget. I saw no sign of a up front master plan which had been broken down item by item, then estimated for time and cost and the sum total agreed.
• In some cases demolition had occurred and it wasn’t clear what would be build in place.
• Building areas where being found and possible work suggested.
• Most of the work was on the old Kings Cross station, some was redesign, some was addition, some was removal and some was simple refactoring.
• We never saw the architects at their drawing boards; we did see them walking around the site, investigating ongoing work; arguing, discussing and negotiating with clients and authorities.
• We saw architects having to change their designs because of business constraints (not enough money to renovate one area) and regulating authorities (English Heritage restricting what the architects could do and how they did it).
• We saw one set of architects disagreeing with another set (Network Rail’s architects wanted to do things want way and English Heritage’s architects thought it should be done another way.)

All in all I found it a fascinating insight into what architects do. As I long suspected, the practice of architecting buildings is not what a lot of software people assume it to be.

How many people are doing Agile?

The BIG question came up the other week during my presentation to HP: “How many organizations are doing Agile?”

As I said at the time: Thats the $64,000 question - or perhaps in todays money, $64,000,000,000.

Of course, it depends a lot on how you even define “Agile”. Sure if your following everything Kent Beck says in the XP books your probably Agile. But in most places adoption is patchy, a bit of TDD here, some iterations there - stand up meetings seem to be very common now but one practice does not an Agile team make.

Within organizations Agile exists in some places and not in others. There is a large Swiss bank in London which has one of the best Agile teams in the country - well, at least it contains many of the best Agile people in the country.

As I said, Its a LARGE bank. I met someone from elsewhere in the bank at a BBQ last week. The very mention of Agile upset him. His team claimed to be doing Scrum but it didn’t sound anything like the Scrum I know - requirements changed everyday.

“What is Agile” is big question in its own right, maybe we’ll come back to it another day. Back to the original question.

When Jeff Sutherland spoke in London last month he mentioned that there are 83 certified Scrum Master trainers. Bob Martin at the ACCU conference mentioned that there are now 50,000 certified Scrum Masters.

Of course we don’t know how many of those Scrum Masters are practicing, how many work with multiple teams and how many unofficial Scrum Masters there.
Neither do we know how many other teams there are so knowing how many Scrum Masters there are doesn’t help.

In late 2006 Gartner issued a report (“Agile Development: Fact or Fiction”) which estimated less than 5% of development groups were doing Agile. If think its reasonable to assume more teams are doing it now.

I heard from a developer who was looking for a new job in Moscow recently that about 1 in 10 companies claimed to be Agile. That would make it 10% of companies, or 10% of teams.

To get an idea of the UK market I did a series of searches on two job boards: JobServe.com and Monster.co.uk. I searchied for all jobs asking for Java, C# and C++ then I repeated the searches for the same languages with Agile.

Monster.co.uk
Jobs
% of Agile
Java
501

Java and Agile
68
13.5%
C#
411

C# and Agile
67
16.3%
C++
1686

C++ and Agile
19
1.1%

I was quite surprised by the results for C++ here, but if you want to work Agile you are going to have to look hard for an Agile C++ shop. Another surprise, especially for C++, is that different jobs boards might be better for different languages (I’ll leave that thought for someone else to follow up.)

JobServe.com
Jobs
% of Agile
Java
1077

Java and Agile
135
12.5%
C#
960

C# and Agile
127
13.2%
C++
705

C++ and Agile
51
7.2%

Interesting while there are fewer C# jobs than Java jobs the percentage of jobs asking for Agile is similar. So bang goes the theory that there is more Agile Java than Agile C#.

These are very crude counts, I made no attempt to adjust for duplicates (which certainly exist), location anything else. I don’t even know if the searches included JavaScript in the Java searches. (I suspect not because the number of Java jobs is not so far ahead of C# jobs.)

It is worth pointing out that, in general, only those jobs which are difficult to fill get listed so these stats are not representative of the job market as a whole.

Crudely, there seems to be a cluster around 13%. If we ignore the highest and lowest results the answer is between 7.2% and 13.5%. Which isn’t far from that Moscow report.

Certainly there will be teams who are asking for Agile but don’t do Agile. For some teams they may be looking for Agile developers in the hope that they bring Agile into the organization.

For me one of the tests of Agile is: Is it working?

If your development is not effective then I don’t think you are Agile. You might be following a process called Scrum, XP, DSDM or something else but if your team is not effective then you are not filling the business need and you aren’t Agile. How can you be Agile if you are failing?

To be Agile you must be effective.

(That is a little sneaky of me because I am equating Agile with success. It also means the questions “How many people are doing Scrum?” is different to “How many people are doing Agile?” but lets leave that to one side.)

Back to my favourite study from Bain Consulting (The Alignment Trap) which estimated that only about 15% of organizations had effective IT. Now not all these IT groups are doing software development and some will be effective without Agile.

But, if we put those two statements together we get 15% as the upper bound of adoption. That is: at most 15% of oranizations are effective, therefore at most 15% of organizations are Agile. (If they are not effective they cannot be Agile.)

None of this data is conclusive, or definative, but I think it does give us a range:

Between 5% and 15% of all software development is done using Agile software development.

It its worth pointing out that both a high number and a low number is good.

The more companies adopt Agile the safer it is to adopt. The more companies adopt it the more mainstream it is and the more reason to adopt it.

But, while only a few companies are working Agile there is a real competitive advantage in companies adopting it. If your company can produce software in a fraction of the time, or with a fraction of the people of your rivals then your onto a good thing.

It is a risk reward ratio. If you wait until its adopted by 80% of the industry there won’t be an advantage. You’ll be playing catch up.

Given that, the 5-15% range is probably good news. Its common enough to be safe but rear enough to be advantagous.

Intermission

On the whole I don’t use this blog to push myself – maybe I should. As I finished that last blog entry it dawned on me: Why not? Maybe I could help your company?

Broadly my activities fall under the heading: Agile Coach, Interim Manager, Consultant and Training.

Here are some examples of how I have recently helped software development teams improve:

• Agile & Scrum training, more details on the Software Strategy website.
• Coaching for teams adopting and running Agile - broadly equivalent to Scrum Master
• Interim Development and Project Management: whether to adopt Agile or to rescue a project; I get involved for several weeks or month, fix things and hand it over
• Project and Team turn around
• Advice on transition to Agile development practices
• Development review

The common theme here is: helping software development team perform better to benefit their business customers.

If you think I may be able to help you please get in touch, allan@allankelly.net

What does an Agile coach do?

I often describe myself as an Agile Coach. In fact coaching teams in Agile development is only part of what I do but its the only bit that fits in two words. For some people the title Agile Coach is self-descriptive but for others it leaves the questioner none the wise.

With, Clark Ching’s recent blog about bread as a prompt, here is what I do as an Agile Coach.

The Coach helps teams adopt and improve Agile methods and practice. A Coach helps people rethink and change the way they go about development.

The Coach role is part Consultant and part embedded Trainer. My task is to help individuals understand how to apply Agile ideas in practice. Part of this involves painting a picture of how the Agile world works by telling stories. It involves explaining how to tackle specific problems, in a specific environment.

I tend to work from the process and management side, so I spend most of my time with team leaders, managers, business analysts and product managers. I attend their regular meetings and hold one-on-one sessions to help them try new approaches to the problems they face. That could be project planning, talking to the business, talking to the development team, or about ongoing problems.

Some Agile Coaches get involved with the technical side. They will pair program with developers and help them write tests for TDD. I don’t normally get involved with the actual coding any more but I do spend time with developers. Sometimes these are one-on-one conversations to address specific issues raised by managers, and sometimes they are conversations initiated by developers themselves. They have a question, they come to me and together we find an answer.

I also work with the entire team – managers, developers, testers, etc. – to help improve the team performance. This typically starts with a discussion about Agile, or a process mapping exercise. When a team is first starting out with Agile I like to run what I call “future-spectives”, or “reverse retrospectives”, in which the team choose the practices they would like to adopt.

Initially I run planning meetings, stand-up Scrum meetings in the mornings, reviews and retrospectives. Over time I like to hand these meetings over to team members to run themselves.

As the team improves I introduce new practices and new exercises. Gradually the team starts to look like a true Agile team. I think you need about six weeks to lay the foundations - hence my Scrum Foundation Programme.

I also help remove block and impediments when I can. It can also be as simple as buying books, or (as on a recent engagement) persuading the company to spend money on more technical training for the teams.

There are hundreds, even thousands, of small decisions made everyday during software development. These decisions are based on people’s mental models of how development works – or how it doesn’t work. Part of the Coach’s role is to help people unlearn many of these models and relearn models based on Agile values.

I’m often heard to say that it is in these thousands of small decisions that success or failure hides - “God is in the detail” or “The Devil is in the detail” if you prefer. By definition big decisions aren’t made that often and you usually know they are being made but small ones are made without thinking. Its no use switching to Agile if you keep making the small decisions based on some other model.

Its these small decisions that you can’t see in advance that can derail work. That’s part of the reason I prefer working as a Coach with a team rather than as a Trainer. Yes I deliver training but when I’m gone do people use it? When I’m there as a Coach I walk people through the changes, and I can provide any training as we go.

Each team is different so the approach has to be different every time. It also means that while I describe myself as an Agile Coach I sometimes work in a more interventionist manor. On occasions I will take over the management of the team – as a Development Manager or Project Manager – and help the team change that way.

Working this way is actually harder. Working as an external Coach you are looking into the team and you can see what is happening more clearly. When you are inside the team its often more difficult to see what needs doing. That said, once you have decided on action it is usually easier to make it happen.

On other occasions I’m more of a hit-and-run Consultant. I arrive, I talk to people, I make recommendations – perhaps write a report – and move on.

Finally, working as a Coach isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a full time job. I’m always conscious that the team shouldn’t become overly dependent on me. I prefer to spend only couple of days a week with a team – although when a company has several teams I may end up switching between them during a full week.

So that – briefly - is what this Agile Coach does for teams. And if you think some of this would help you please give me a call - 0845 310 8366 (UK), allan@allankelly.net. (Yes, that last paragraph is self serving but this is my blog!)