Agile coaching for global software development

This paper presents a case study on building a successful agile coaching team focusing on global software development projects in an international Nordic-based software company. We describe how the team of eight coaches was built, and how the coaches work together as a team using agile practices, such as weekly iterations, backlogs, and daily stand-ups. Furthermore, we describe their deep and narrow' approach to working closely with case projects, and the benefits to the coached projects. We describe the main challenges in building the coaching activities in a globally distributed company. The paper concludes with a set of lessons learned for coaching globally distributed projects and a discussion of the future plans for scaling up coaching by building a global coaching network within the company. We collected the data using 13 semi-structured interviews of the coaching team members, and personnel from four coached case projects. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.