Hi @mrbombmusic ,
i will try to explain what an agile coach is, and what it is with agile practices as good as I can in a few sentences. A short history first:
Quite some time ago (I think in the mid 90th) it became more and more clear, that the approach in the software industry regarding the way they work and the way projects are organised was having a high failure rate. So alternate models have been explored (XP - extreme programming http://www.extremeprogramming.org/ ) for example, and lead to the agile manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/. With the agile manifesto as a background, many agile methods have been developed, for use in software development in particular, but more and more with product development over all. Scrum and Kanban might be the most popular frameworks, with probably 50 or 100 more beeing less known.
With the new methods came new roles into organisations, for example a “product owner” and a “scrum master” instead of “project managers”, with new definitions. The agile coach is another one.
As an agile coach I help development teams (on a small scale) and organisations / companies (on a large scale) to transform their culture, habits, communication, development and coding practices, processes, tools and a lot more things, to be able to use agile methods. And this includes a lot of training and learning, to give all those folks a chance to experience what this new work environment that I try to introduce might be like:
A team focused approach, continous learning and feedback cycles, an increasing level of self organisation within the teams, and a lot more.
“Agile practices” are details used in the sofware industry, that help getting better / closer to the agile principles, i.e. using test driven development or continous integration systems. It is still sometimes a surprise how far behind many enterprises are, even though one would consider software companies as “top technology”, but many of them seem to be stuck in the 80th with an introduction of PRINCE2 framework and no update ever since.
There are various tools used frequently by me and my colleagues to create a learning experience supporting this, i.e. building stuff in teams with lego bricks, group excercises, other game like elements. Using Lego is a “no brainer”, since there is nothing you need to learn about how to use it, you can immediately focus on “producing” something. So you can create a learning module short as 90 minutes for example, to experience some paricular aspect of an agile practice, for example.
Including some more techie things includes usually a lot more learning about the tool, so usually the focus tends to be distracted for the learning objectives to tool usage/mastery, what I try to avoid.
Sonic PI seems to be easy enough to use it even in smaller learning modules, and might be an interesting option including something that is closer to “real” programming nevertheless, since I often have a feedback in terms of “yes, it’s like that with the lego game, but with software development it is totally different”, i.e. the transfer seems to be difficult for some folks.
sorry about the lengthy post :-), I tried to explain. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
cheers, and happy new year,
Reinald
