Hidden facilitators of agile transition: Agile coaches and agile champions

Abstract

Prevalence of Agile methods in software companies is increasing. Software companies need to employ these methods to overcome the inherent challenges of traditional methods. However, transitioning to Agile approach is a topic of debate and needs to be supported by appropriate facilitators. Conducting a large-scale research study, revealed the most important Agile transition facilitators. This paper solely presents two hidden facilitators of Agile transition, Agile coaches and Agile champions, which rarely have been taken into consideration. Both of these facilitators directly impress the people involved in the transition. People-intensive nature of Agile methods and critical role of the people in the transition process reflect the importance of these facilitators when a software company is in the transition process. This study showed that considering these facilitators when can highly impress the success of the transition and revealed the real responsibilities of Agile coaches and Agile champions when transitioning to Agile.

Doing complexity leadership theory: How agile coaches at Spotify practise enabling leadership

“…Annosi, Magnusson, Martini, & Appio, 2016;Hoda, Noble, & Marshall, 2013;Moe, Dingsøyr, & Dybå, 2010) have not examined the role of agile coaches specifically or with the perspective of coaches as (complexity) leaders. A search on Scopus in August 2018 with the terms "agile coach" or "scrum master" results in only one peerreviewed study (Srivastava & Jain, 2017), and three conference papers examining the practices of the roles explicitly at all (Bass, 2014;Parizi, Gandomani, & Nafchi, 2014;Santos, Goldman, & Filho, 2013). This study thus adds to our knowledge about practices of leadership in non-managerial roles, particularly as it applies to the issue of management of emergent processes, by its description of the micro-level basis of accomplishing adaptive space through local, everyday actions of enabling leadership.…”

Transformation towards agile software product line engineering in large companies: A literature review

“…An agile transition should be considered as an organizational project . Hence, the companies should create a project plan and framework before starting the transformation . Additionally, the companies should plan how to collect empirical feedback .…”

“…Selecting and using tools such as Jira, Confluence, or Trello strongly depend on the company's constraints and legal requirements—in particular in large companies. Next to the tools, the workspace of a team needs to be prepared . In agile software development, a Scrum or eXtreme Programming team mostly works collocated in one room—if possible.…”

“…Though, managers often fall easily back in old habits . Hence, their commitment is mandatory for introducing an agile mind‐set …”

The Impact of Team Climate on Failure and Success of Scrum Adoption

“…Motivated members try to deal with the emerging challenges and find the best strategies to cope with them. Also, having Agile Champions, those who can persuade others to be Agile by their behaviors, promotes and facilitate Scrum adoption as well as other Agile methods [18,22,23].…”