XP2008 conference, Limerick, Ireland - June 10 - 14, 2008

Call for Participation in workshop on Exploring Agile Coaching

Organizers: RachelDavies & Liz Sedley

This is an invitation to join our workshop at the XP2008 conference, explore Agile Coaching.
When a team sets out to apply agile software development on a project, they soon will discover there are plenty of challenges. A coach can help guide a team through adoption of agile practices but to do this they need skills in mentoring. This workshop aims to develop useful guidance for agile coaches that will help them in their work.

We encourage participation from scrum masters, agile project managers, development managers and agile consultants. Participants should have some experience of working in agile software development. Interested people should submit a position paper to the organizers of not more than 1,500 words describing their background, their interest in the workshop topic and ideally with a personal story about agile coaching which might be used to develop coaching guidelines. To attend you need to register for XP2008 conference.

• Personal Background.
Briefly outline your experience with agile software development.

• Suggestions for areas to be explored in the workshop.
Describe one or more coaching stories with lessons learned.

Workshop Overview

The workshop will start with introductions followed by a short presentation to introduce the topic. Next participants will share their experiences by reading their position papers.

The workshop will start with introductions followed by a short presentation on coaching agile teams. The purpose of the presentation is to introduce the topic and share some examples from real projects. Next participants will share their experience with the group by presenting their position papers. The workshop will then move into working in small groups to try an exercise in coaching agile practices. Following a break for coffee, we will debrief the exercise and discuss aspects of coaching revealed. Now the groups start working to distill their ideas into guidelines for coaching agile teams. Each work group will take a turn to present their set that they develop to the session group.

The presenters will photograph all the outputs and arrange for these to be uploaded to the workshop web page.

Workshop Organizers

Rachel Davies is a highly respected Agile Coach whose expertise is recognized internationally across the XP, Scrum and DSDM communities. She has 20 years experience in software development and started her own agile journey in 2000 as a programmer in an XP team.

She has provided coaching and consulting advice to many teams. Supporting introduction of agile techniques in a variety of domains, as diverse as banking to embedded, and on projects large and small means she has plenty of examples and stories to share with the participants of this workshop.

Rachel has served on the board of directors of Agile Alliance for 5 years and is conference chair for Agile2008. Rachel has presented at numerous conferences on topics related to agile coaching and has participated in the XP 200x conference program every year since 2001.

Liz Sedley has been working as an Agile Coach for the last 4 years, in 3 companies. Previously to that she was a software engineer working in C++ and C# since graduating with a Computer Science Degree in 1992.

She has worked with small start-ups, medium size companies, and is currently working with the very large BBC. She has worked in shrink wrapped software and bespoke solutions. She has worked with external and internal customers.

Liz presented an "Introduction to Lean Value Stream Mapping" at the XPDay 2007 conference in London.