Introduction

Welcome! Perhaps you’ve been a team manager, project manager, or possibly a business analyst. You may be a tester or even a software developer. Maybe you’ve been through a good number of projects and have experienced the highs of success and fallen in a few potholes along the way.

Well, your team or organization has decided that they want to “go Agile” and you’ve been volun-told to be the ScrumMaster. Congratulations! You’ve had a few days of training, but now what?

There are plenty of books out there about Scrum and Agile Software Development in general, and some on Agile Coaching in particular. The coaching books are excellent - I’ve read them - and there are dozens of books to read to educate yourself on Agile/Scrum/Lean in general, or on specific topics such as Estimation and Planning, Organizational Issues, Technical Practices, etc. You could literally spend months doing nothing but reading. However, you don’t have months… you don’t have weeks… in fact, you’re lucky if you have days! So what can you do?

Well, this book is somewhat different from the others. It won’t delve into the minutiae of the Agile values & principles or any particular Agile practices unless warranted by the example at hand. What the examples will do, though, is distil specific issues that commonly occur while working with Agile teams into small lessons that you can easily read and applied in a short period of time.

These examples use the metaphor of our progression through the stages of life to provide a backdrop for a team’s journey towards Agility, and your journey as a parent… er, I mean ScrumMaster. Anecdotes provide the context for a particular point, and concrete examples give you strategies for working through those situations, and even entire stages in a team’s “life”.

Life Stages

A team’s progression during a transition to an Agile Software Development approach can be roughly equated to the following stages of a person’s life:

• Infant
• Toddler
• Preschooler
• Elementary School
• Adolescent
• Teenager
• Young Adult
• Mature Adult

It’s not a perfect model, but that’s the beauty of models - none of them are perfect. That’s why they’re only models! We’re going to examine each of these stages through anecdotes and advice as a team progresses from their nascent beginnings to full maturity.

So, again, welcome to your journey into the world of a ScrumMaster!