Numerous Agile methods and principles emphasize the value of collaboration and self-organization. Most books on the subject of Agile development discuss principles and practices related to planning and development practices. Yet few Agile books delve deeply into the How To's of collaboration, facilitation and project leadership. Collaboration Explained, by Jean Tabaka, does exactly this: it takes the essential skills, methods, and proven practices of successful team leaders and group facilitators, and explains them in detail while also applying them directly to the context of agile software development.
While it's true that there are certainly many good books on facilitation and collaborative leadership, they don't directly address common software development scenarios. Section I of the book discusses Setting the Collaborative Stage. It provides a definition of collaboration and a description of collaborative cultures, leaders and teams. Section II then gets on with the business of how to apply collaborative leadership and facilitation skills to agile (and even non-agile) software development.
Chapter 5 explains the application of these skills to status meetings, planning meetings (including for releases and iterations), working sessions for requirements and agile modeling, one-on-one meetings, retrospectives and end-of-iterations demos.
Chapters 6-8 help you prepare yourself, your participants and your agenda for collaborating and reaching consensus.
Chapters 9-12 present specific collaboration tools and techniques that have been team-tested and battle-proven in the trenches.
Subsequent chapters do the same for conducting dialogues, eliciting input and feedback from experts and customers, visioning and (my personal favorite) managing and resolving conflict in a way that encourages productive conflict rather than hiding from conflict and confrontation
Section III addresses extending collaboration tools, techniques and technologies to the scenarios of small teams, distributed teams and
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organizations. The last section has specific collaboration facilitation guides for XP (and Industrial XP), Crystal Clear, Scrum and generic project meetings.
What I like most about the book is that it is eminently practical, giving not merely explanations and abstract guidelines, but concrete practices and tools for preparing and facilitating the "magic" of collaboration. I particularly like the approach to conflict-resolution, where productive conflict is encouraged and managed respectfully and constructively. All too many times I have seen otherwise great project leads create dysfunctional teams because they avoided and evaded conflict and confrontation instead of taking those bulls by the horns in a thoughtful and compassionate two-way manner. The chapter on extending collaboration to distributed teams looks to be indispensable.
All-in-all, Collaboration Explained appears to be the only book of its kind thus far. I know of no other book that specifically presents these critical communication and facilitation skills for would-be software project leaders and shows how to apply them to the specific scenarios of a software development project. As such, I currently consider Collaboration Explained to be nothing less then quintessential to anyone wanting to lead or coach an agile (or non-agile) software development team.
Brad Appleton is an enterprise SCM/ALM solution architect for a Fortune 100 technology company. He is co-author of Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration, the "Agile SCM" column in CMCrossroads.com's CM Journal, and a former section editor for The C++ Report. Since 1987, Brad has extensive experience using, developing, and supporting SCM environments for teams of all shapes and sizes. He holds an M.S. in Software Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics. You can reach Brad by email at
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Numerous Agile methods and principles emphasize the value of collaboration and self-organization. Most books on the subject of Agile development discuss principles and practices related to planning and development practices. Yet few Agile books delve deeply into the How To's of collaboration, facilitation and project leadership. Collaboration Explained, by Jean Tabaka, does exactly this: it takes the essential skills, methods, and proven practices of successful team leaders and group facilitators, and explains them in detail while also applying them directly to the context of agile software development.
