Agile software development can be described as philosophy of how software development is conducted. Short, timeboxed iterations with adaptive, evolutionary refinement of plans and goals form the central core of the agile software development. This loose family of methodologies is usually taught via coaching. It is not, however, currently clear in the literature what are the facets of coaching or even what are its goals.

Tatu Kairi explores the roles of the agile coach, defining it as mentoring which aims at intervening the normal work in a software project concerning either by the software development team, the organization of the team or the customers. The purpose of these interventions is to first teach how the agile software development is executed and later fine tune the performance of the team. This thesis continues with an examination on what principles should the coach employ with the software development team while coaching. Framework of this interaction is developed utilising constructivist learning theory as well as using relevant computer science literature.

To be able to evaluate, if the subjects of coaching are learning and how the learning is occurring, two metrics are presented as tools for the coach to employ critical self reflection. Sidky Agile Measurement Index (SAMI) is used to measure the level of adoption, while similar KMSmodel was created for the purpose of this thesis to profile on a more finegrained level, what the level of agility is composed of.

This framework is empirically tested in two case studies conducted in the Software Factory course at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. The course provides a realistic, industry- like setting where students form a team and complete a software development project for a real customer. As a participatory action research, the researcher acted as a coach to two new software teams, employing the theoretical framework and recording the events of the projects to a research diary and collecting metrics for the two models. The empirical results show that the proposed theoretical framework was successfully employed on the two case studies as well as initially asserting the expressiveness of it. This thesis concludes with a discussion of these results and the conclusions drawn of them.

Tatu Kairi (University of Helsinki): Coaching agile software development teams: A case study from mentoring viewpoint

https://www.cloudsoftwareprogram.org/rs/2482/6e620c3b-438c-425c-bfcc-a70731023c59/a86/filename/agilecoaching-tatukairi.pdf

Cloud Software Finland is Tivit's four-year (2010-2014) program which focuses on developing different areas of cloud services. The program is sponsored by Tekes

Cloud Software Finland Program: https://www.cloudsoftwareprogram.org/