Lean-Agile can be daunting to learn because of the many topics. Reading paths provide guided explorations of critical topics to speed your learning. There are reading paths for the roles of Lean-Agile and reading paths for some of the specific important skills required for Lean-Agile, skills which might span several roles (such as facilitation or decomposing requirements).
Reading paths for roles
Agile Coach
Coaching is the practice of supporting individuals, teams, and an organization through the process of achieving a professional result. It differs from consulting, mentoring, and training. It involves more questioning and facilitating than doing particular tasks for the client. It is more focused on process, discovery, transition, leadership, and mindset than it is on particular projects.
Agile Coach: Basic
The Agile Coach (Basic) reading path introduces coaches to what is involved in helping clients to develop new mindsets to do Lean-Agile, to acquire a new set of tools, and to make adjustments to processes and structures.
Agile Coach: Advanced
The Agile Coach (Advanced) reading path is intended for the coach who is already competent in either Scrum and/or Kanban and help them understand more advanced ideas for coaching in Lean, Scrum and kanban. It is a collection of ideas, tools and techniques that will take you from being team oriented to being value oriented.
Application Development Manager
The Application Development Manager is the person who has accepted responsibility for the holistic integrity and functionality of the application. This role is responsible for risks associated with architecture and quality.
In a nutshell, the Application Development Manager role is about the content.
Developer
The Developer role is responsible for working with other members of the team to build potentially releasable features in every iteration. The Developer collaborates with Business analysts and testers on stories and tasks, ensuring that the results meet all functional and acceptance tests. The Developer also helps the team resolve impediments, getting help as needed.
Product Manager
The Product Manager represents the voice of the customer to the entire value stream or program (in a program-based organization).
Product Owner
The Product Owner is the pivotal role in enabling the seamless flow of development from value to product. This is the person who connects two key functions and associated groups of people: the ones who identify what value is needed (the Business) and the ones who determine how and implement it (development team).
Team Agility Coach
The Team Agility Coach is responsible for shepherding the team, creating a trustful environment, facilitating team meetings, asking the difficult questions, removing impediments, making issues and problems visible, keeping the process moving forward, and socializing Lean-Agile within the greater organization.
Note: Many organizations call this role the “Scrum Master.”
Technology Delivery Manager
The Technology Delivery Manager is the person responsible for ensuring and managing the Business evolution of the system – that is, building the system oriented around quick delivery of Business value increments. The Technology Delivery Manager is responsible to maintain the functional integrity of the system throughout its development and deployment. The Technology Delivery Manager is responsible for risks associated with delivery.
In a nutshell, the Technology Delivery Manager role is about the timing of delivery.
Tester
The Tester reading path introduces the key role of testing and what that looks like in Lean-Agile. A key Lean-Agile principle is to aim for perfection, to improve constantly. It is everyone’s job. This informs the role of the testing: it is done early in the process and is the responsibility of the team. Every feature and every story must have one or more acceptance tests. The outcome of testing is to deliver fairly well-perfected code where defects have no serious consequences.
Reading paths for skills
Decomposing Requirements
The Decomposing Requirements reading path introduces the work of developing requirements “Just-in-Time” in order to maximize feedback and to deliver value quickly. We begin by describing the desired “Capability” to be served by the product, at a high and abstract level. Then we move further along toward a product, adding detail, layer by layer, to the description of what is needed: Minimum Business Increments, Features, Stories and Tasks.
Core Developer Skills
The Core Developer Skills reading path introduces the basics of what is required for Developers to write quality code.
Extending Scrum to Leanban
Extending Scrum to Leanban is an approach to help Agile teams select and use Agile approaches that best fit their situation and needs. It uses Lean principles to guide them. Leanban is focused at the team level. A similar approach could be used to guide issues of scale.
Facilitation
The Facilitation reading path introduces some helpful insights into facilitation for Lean-Agile. Lean-Agile places a premium on communication between people. It reduces waste and delay caused by miscommunication and waiting on others. One consequence is that in Lean-Agile, there are a number of meetings. They tend to be shorter and focused and they happen at a regular cadence. Effective meetings require some level of facilitation and often that falls to the Team Agility Coach. Thus, facilitation is an important skill for Team Agility Coaches.
Scrum
The Scrum reading path introduces essential concepts for Scrum in a Lean-Agile environment. Scrum is a conceptual framework for undertaking software engineering projects that embraces and promotes evolutionary change throughout the entire life-cycle of the project.
