What’s On Your Bookshelf?
“How do I become an Agile development coach?” was a question I heard at an open forum with Diana Larsen. One way would be to work with Kent Beck, like Lance Kind did. Another approach would be to read and practice. What would one read? What books are on an Agile development coach’s bookshelf?
An Agile development coach’s bookshelf needs shelves for several subjects: productivity, development, XP, Scrum, facilitation, consulting, and coaching. These subjects enhance the skills essential to Agile development coaching.
On the bottom shelf are books by productivity and leadership authors David Allen and Stephen Covey. The writings of both have been of interest to knowledge workers. David Allen’s Getting Things Done is particularly popular, with references in 43 Folders, Stepcase Lifehack, and Wired. Stephen Covey’s classic is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, but I also like The 8th Habit and First Things First.
On the next shelf up are development books. These are books on languages (like Python, Perl, C#, Java) and tools. A personal favorite language book is The Perl CD Bookshelf (including Perl Cookbook and Programming Perl), even though Perl‘s support for object-oriented programming is still evolving. Another, more object-oriented, favorite is C# 3.0 Design Patterns. (Could someone recommend a similar book for Java?) For Java there’s Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer’s Notebook. Though many resources are online, on this shelf would also be books on tools like Subversion, Eclipse, Visual Studio, JUnit, Ant, Maven, Cruise Control, and Hudson (see “The Busy Manager’s Guide to Development Tools“). This shelf can be crowded.
The shelf above development is also crowded: a shelf on XP. My shelf starts with Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck. Agile development starts with user stories, and Mike Cohn’s User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development can help begin proficiency with user stories. Next to these is an old printout of “A Laboratory for Teaching Object-Oriented Thinking,” a paper on CRC cards.
Also on the XP shelf by Kent Beck is Test-Driven Development: By Example. Practicing Kent’s examples can lead to proficiency using TDD in simple unit test situations. Another author I like is Martin Fowler, who wrote Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, and who continues to blog, especially on Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Further thoughts on that topic is in Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky,who refactors to patterns rather than planning for patterns.
When responding to pair programming skeptics I can pull Pair Programming Illuminated off the XP shelf; it has many suggestions for pairing effectively. When I want to accomplish new objectives in programming with less anxiety and sharper focus, a copy of The Pomodoro Technique (a technique for sustainable pace) is available.
The next shelf up has books on Scrum. These start with Agile Software Development with Scrum and Agile Project Management with Scrum. Here sit the course notebooks for the Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Product Owner courses. Here also is The Enterprise and Scrum. Also related is Diana Larsen’s Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, since an effective retrospective is important for the team to improve its processes continually.
Coaches are occasionally facilitators and often consultants, so the top shelf has books on facilitation and consulting. On facilitation are Collaboration Explained and Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. Here might also be books on the process of thinking in groups. This shelf of an Agile development coach’s bookshelf also has books on consulting: Flawless Consulting, Secrets of Consulting, and The Trusted Advisor.
At last we arrive at the shelf for coaching. Here are books like Leading with Questions, and articles like “Bringing Science to the Art of Coaching.” (Could someone recommend more books for this shelf?)
There are many skills that can’t easily be learned from books; the coaching skills of paraphrasing, picking up on non-verbal cues, and reflective listening come to mind. Reading without practice is less useful as well; an Agile development coach needs to write many unit tests. Nevertheless, this bookshelf of books can contribute to the expertise needed for the role. What’s on your bookshelf?
March 26th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Addendum: Others have also recommended _Quality Software Management: Congruent Action_ (http://www.amazon.com/Quality-Software-Management-Congruent-Action/dp/0932633285/).
March 27th, 2009 at 10:00 am
That’s a great book shelf – I’m more interested in what you are reading now.
My current book shelf has: The Back of the Napkin, Presentation Zen, Brain Rules, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.
So what is a bookshelf really for; a book you have read, or a book you will read?
April 13th, 2009 at 7:42 am
At the recommendation of a colleague, I have started _The Speed of Trust_ by Stephen M.R. Covey (Stephen R. Covey’s son).
April 13th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Just took two crates of books to the used book store, came back $42 richer for the experience! I recommend the practice of lightening the book shelf.
What caused this behavior of hoarding books, personal libraries, etc. I assume it is a puritanical influence, or we believed something Ben Franklin propagated, not that a printer would be unbiased. In his day books were expensive (measured in the relative book cost/days pay) today they are very cheep – yet we still treat them as expensive and hoard them away on bookshelves. An alternative is to set them free: http://www.bookcrossing.com/ to put them into circulation for that is the purpose of binding words to paper.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Good! I live simply in small spaces, and occasionally celebrate Discardia (http://www.metagrrrl.com/discardia/). I often check out books from the public library (e.g., _The Speed of Trust_), so I mostly purchase books I want to refer to or re-read. In the process of storing and selling other items, though, I have discovered that space for a bookshelf is more important to me than space for many other belongings.