skip to main content
10.1145/1987875.1987893acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

How does an agile coaching team work?: a case study

Published:21 May 2011Publication History

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a case study on building a successful agile coaching team focusing on distributed software development projects in a global software company. We describe how the team of eight coaches was built, how the coaches work as a team, how the coaches work with their customer projects, what the main benefits of coaching have been for the customer projects, and the main challenges on building the coaching activities.

The data was gathered by 13 semi-structured interviews of the coaching team members, as well as the interviews with personnel from four coached customer projects.

References

  1. Yin, R. K. 1994 Case Study Research, Designs and Methods, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, California, 1994.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. S. Hanly, L. Waite, L. Meadows, and R. Leaton. Agile coaching in british telecom: Making strawberry jam. In AGILE, pages 194--202. IEEE Computer Society, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. L. Adkins. Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition. Addison-Wesley, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. G. Hedin, L. Bendix, and B. Magnusson. Coaching coaches. In M. Marchesi and G. Succi, editors, Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering, 4th International Conference, XP 2003, Genova, Italy, May 25-29, 2003 Proceedings, volume 2675 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 154--160. Springer, 2003. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. A. Padula. Organically growing internal coaches. In Y. Dubinsky, T. Dybå, S. Adolph, and A. S. Sidky, editors, 2009 Agile Conference, Chicago, IL, USA, 24-28 August 2009, pages 237--242. IEEE Computer Society, 2009. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. R. Hoda, J. Noble, and S. Marshall. Organizing selforganizing teams. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1, ICSE '10, pages 285--294, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. J. J. Shrinivasavadhani and V. Panicker. Remote mentoring a distributed agile team. In AGILE, pages 322--326. IEEE, 2008. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. K. Silva and C. Doss. The growth of an agile coach community at a fortune 200 company. In Proceedings of the AGILE 2007, pages 225--228, Washington, DC, USA, 2007. IEEE Computer Society. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. W. Krebs. Turning the knobs: A coaching pattern for XP through agile metrics. In D. Wells and L. A. Williams, editors, Extreme Programming and Agile Methods - XP/Agile Universe 2002, Second XP Universe and First Agile Universe Conference Chicago, IL, USA, August 4-7, 2002, Proceedings, volume 2418 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 60--69. Springer, 2002. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. B. Victor and N. Jacobson. We didn't quite get it. In Agile Conference, 2009. AGILE '09, pages 271--274, 2009. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. P. Brennan. What agile teams can learn from sports coaching. In A. Sillitti, A. Martin, X. Wang, and E. Whitworth, editors, Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, 11th International Conference, XP 2010, Trondheim, Norway, June 1-4, 2010. Proceedings, volume 48 of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 269--276. Springer, 2010.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. M. Q. Patton. Qualitative evaluation and research methods. Sage Publications, Newbury Park, Calif., 2nd edition, 1990.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. C. Ebert, C. H. Parro, R. Suttels, and H. Kolarczyk. Better validation in a world-wide development environment. Software Metrics, IEEE International Symposium on, 0:298, 2001. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. R. Davies and J. Pullicino. What does an agile coach do? In P. Abrahamsson, M. Marchesi, and F. Maurer, editors, Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, 10th International Conference, XP 2009, Pula, Sardinia, Italy, May 25-29, 2009. Proceedings, volume 31 of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 198--199. Springer, 2009.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. R. Davies and L. Sedley. Exploring agile coaching. In P. Abrahamsson, R. Baskerville, K. Conboy, B. Fitzgerald, L. Morgan, and X. Wang, editors, Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, 9th International Conference, XP 2008, Limerick, Ireland, June 10-14, 2008. Proceedings, volume 9 of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 244--245. Springer, 2008.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. S. Fraser, E. Lundh, R. Davies, J. Eckstein, D. Larsen, and K. Vilkki. Perspectives on agile coaching. In P. Abrahamsson, M. Marchesi, and F. Maurer, editors, Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, 10th International Conference, XP 2009, Pula, Sardinia, Italy, May 25-29, 2009. Proceedings, volume 31 of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 271--276. Springer, 2009.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. S. Fraser, R. Reinitz, J. Eckstein, J. Kerievsky, E. Lundh, R. Mee, and M. Poppendieck. Coaching for agile and xtreme practices A fishbowl with piranhas. In M. Marchesi and G. Succi, editors, Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering, 4th International Conference, XP 2003, Genova, Italy, May 25-29, 2003 Proceedings, volume 2675 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 451--454. Springer, 2003. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. S. Fraser, R. Reinitz, J. Eckstein, J. Kerievsky, R. Mee, and M. Poppendieck. Xtreme programming and agile coaching. In R. Crocker and G. L. S. Jr, editors, Companion of the 18th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2003, October 26-30, 2003, Anaheim, CA, USA, pages 265--267. ACM, 2003. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. O. Hazzan and Y. Dubinsky. Coaching agile software projects: tutorial proposal - ICSE 2010. In J. Kramer, J. Bishop, P. T. Devanbu, and S. Uchitel, editors, Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2, ICSE 2010, Cape Town, South Africa, 1-8 May 2010, pages 481--482. ACM, 2010. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  20. E. Lundh. Elements of an art - agile coaching. In P. Abrahamsson, M. Marchesi, and F. Maurer, editors, Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, 10th International Conference, XP 2009, Pula, Sardinia, Italy, May 25-29, 2009. Proceedings, volume 31 of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, pages 238--239. Springer, 2009.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. How does an agile coaching team work?: a case study

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Login options

        Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

        Sign in
        • Published in

          cover image ACM Other conferences
          ICSSP '11: Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Software and Systems Process
          May 2011
          256 pages
          ISBN:9781450307307
          DOI:10.1145/1987875

          Copyright © 2011 ACM

          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 21 May 2011

          Permissions

          Request permissions about this article.

          Request Permissions

          Check for updates

          Qualifiers

          • research-article

        PDF Format

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader