Agile Coaching Kickstarter for the QA Crowd

Full-Day Tutorial (6 hours)

Agile QA people are more effective when they can communicate and collaborate more deeply with all stakeholders (developers, users, managers, sponsors and so).

Timetable

9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Saturday 9th

Audience

Agile QA managers, Agile coaches and testers

Required

Paper notebook, pen and an open mind :)

Key-Learning

  • Learn the fundamentals inner and communication skills to be more effective in validating and improving the quality of your products.

If you look at the generic description of coaching, you’ll find that coaching is about “improving someone else’s performance” – or some variation on this theme.

How does this relate to Agile Coaching and to the Agile Testing community?

Which is the “performance” that Agile Coaching can help improve? A few things that come to mind are: the understanding of the domain; the understanding of someone else’s needs; the ability to identity risks; the ability to take risks; the openness to ask for help; the selfishness of giving/offering help.

If you think about it, technology plays a very small role in all the things listed just above. Instead, the human aspects are paramount. And, if we look specifically at the Agile Testing world, we’ll notice that:


  • Testers are usually a minority in the team. However, they can have a more positive influence through their Agile coaching skills

  • Testers are in a good position to be coaches. They have a bigger picture view and sometimes systemic understanding of the process, architecture, etc. They are curious and know there’s always room for improvement. That’s why this workshop is “for them”.

Testers may therefore be a nice guide for the team and for single individuals.

This workshop is an introduction to the basic communication skills and inner stance required to start helping someone else bring out their potential, without imposing your own view (even unconsciously), without manipulating or patronizing.

Some of the topics that we’ll cover are:

- Defining training, consulting, coaching, mentoring

- Your inner stance while coaching

- Self-awareness

- Active Listening

- Asking the right question (with an intro to Clean Language)

- Creating trust and rapport

- Giving and receiving feedback

Related Sessions