Soft Skills Essentials for Software Craftsmen at XPDays Benelux

Last week, together with Yves Hanoulle (twitter: @YvesHanoulle), I presented again “Soft Skills Essentials for Software Craftsmen”, this time at XPDays Benelux.

Here are the slides:

As usual at XPDays Benelux, the audience was very mature and interested in these topics (in the meantime the conference is probably more about soft skills than coding!), so we got loads of very interesting questions and the request for more material: so here is a reading list for the three topics covered by the presentation.

Status
The concept of status comes from the Improvisation Theatre school. The two best known books are:

• Keith Johnstone – Improv and the Theatre
• Tom Salinsky, Deborah Frances-White – The Improv Handbook

Solution Focused
The content proposed in the presentation is just a small part of the Solution Focused approach. There are several valuable books on the market. In a previous post I already mentioned some relevant books (be sure to look also at the ones in the comment from Hans-Peter Korn at the end of the post!). Here are a couple more:

• Paul Z. Jackson, Mark McKergow – The Solutions Focus
• Ellen K. Quick – Doing What Works in Brief Therapy

Transactional Analysis
On the top of all the books of Eric Berne, I particularly recommend this because of its clarity:

• Ian Stewart, Vann Joines – TA Today – A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis

A warning, though: while the agile community is very fond of books as a source of information, a real learning requires practical experience and interaction with people who are already practicing a certain craft.

So feel free to read the books I mentioned, but then please do yourself a favour and search for a good course or, at least, a peer group where you can practice what you read. In particular work in groups of at least three people, so one of you can always be an observer and give feedback on the process.