Transmitting human experience through written material is not easy. As Rachel Davies did in “Agile Coaching”, Lyssa Adkins manages to do it brilliantly in this book that covers the same topic. Based on her own experience of “recovering command-and-control project manager”, she write about all the circumstances where you can coach people, explaining both what you should and shouldn’t do.

With a lot of modest comments about the fact that being a good coach is a journey and not a status, the book is structured around the different aspects of coaching (mentoring, facilitating, teaching, …) It provides both a conceptual view backed by experience reports and some “tools” and check-lists that will help coaches. My favorite parts are two lists presenting the preferred abilities that agile coaches should have and the failures modes that a coach could encounter.

This is a very well written book that I will warmly recommend to everyone working in software development. Its message is not only about coaching or managing software developers, but rather encompass the whole values of working together in project teams.