One of the searches that stumbled across my blog was the “Agile Coaching Reading List”. Running the same query returned a huge mish mash of lots of different things so I thought I’d put together my list of essential reads. Of course, simply reading the books won’t mean that you’re an expert (and I suggest working with another coach to develop that) though it’ll definitely help in providing context, advice or skills that you need to practice.
Methodologies and principles
- Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck.
- Agile Project Management with SCRUM by Ken Schwaber.
- Lean Software Development by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
Additional context
- Slack by Tom De Marco.
Teamwork
- Collaboration Explained by Jean Tabaka
Continuous improvement
- Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen.
Requirements and planning
- User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn.
- Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn.
Development practices
- Refactoring by Martin Fowler
- Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck.
- Pair Programming Illuminated by Laurie Williams.
Would you recommend anything else? What did I miss? Please leave a comment if you do. I’ll also post the other books I still think are worth reading that didn’t quite make the cut and why.
An additional retrospective book i found valuable is:
Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews by Norman L. Kerth (Author)
I’d add “Refactoring to Patterns” by Joshua Kerievsky as well as “Test Driven, Practical TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java Developers” by Lasse Koskela.
Refactoring to patterns is a great complement to Fowler’s book on refactoring.
Test driven really covers writing test first code in java along with an strong bent for refactoring including the test code.
regards
Tony
I’d add
“The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering”,by Frederick P. Brooks
and
“Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity” by Joel Spolsky
Check out “The Responsibility Virus” by Roger L Martin for an excellent discussion of teambuilding and personal motiviation and development within your team.(http://www.amazon.com/Responsibility-Virus-Shrinking-Violets-Partnership/dp/0465044107)
Just a little correction, the Agile Estimating and Planning is part of the Robert C. Martin Series but was written by Mike Cohn.
Regards
Luciano – thanks. It should be fixed now.