Agile coaching for global software development
Maria Paasivaara, Casper Lassenius · Journal of Software Evolution and Process · 2012
SUMMARY This paper presents a case study on building a successful agile coaching team focusing on global software development projects in an international Nordic‐based software company. We describe how the team of eight coaches was built, and how the coaches work together as a team using agile practices, such as weekly iterations, backlogs, and daily stand‐ups. Furthermore, we describe their ‘deep and narrow’ approach to working closely with case projects, and the benefits to the coached projects. We describe the main challenges in building the coaching activities in a globally distributed company. The paper concludes with a set of lessons learned for coaching globally distributed projects and a discussion of the future plans for scaling up coaching by building a global coaching network within the company. We collected the data using 13 semi‐structured interviews of the coaching team members, and personnel from four coached case projects. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.