Agile Teams
Today we bring you our latest blog on Agile Teams.
Agile Team
Agile teams focus on people in everything they do, one of the four values in Agile Manifesto is – Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools
Each and every agile team member juggles between their team, project stakeholders and customers. It is important to strike the right balance and achieve sweet spot so software development projects can be delivered on time as team effort matching customer expectations with high quality results.
Our focus in this blog is on Agile Team. What are the key characteristics of agile team? Let’s have a look.
Collaborative: Agile teams need to be collaborative, work towards a common goal. Have face to face conversations, be courageous to resolve each other’s problems and help each other achieve the project outcomes. Principle#6 in Agile manifesto explains how best agile teams can be effective.
Agile manifesto Principle#6 – The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversations
Face-to-face conversations do not necessarily mean that agile teams should be co-located but it definitely helps with all team members of the software development agile team to be at the same place. During Covid days, this philosophy was evolved and remote working too became next to natural way of working by way of many collaborative face-to-face video call tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and many others.
Work together: Agile teams work together on daily basis, best thing to start the working day is to get on a 15 min daily stand up call to discuss the progress of work and agree key priorities for the day. Key impediments are uncovered and resolved with help of team, leader, product owner or experts in the project. Principle#4 in Agile manifesto highlights the benefit of working together.
Agile manifesto Principle#4 – Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project
Customer focused: Customer is at the heart of everything agile team develops. Key is for agile development team to get all the priority user stories agreed and developed with help of Product Owner who understands what customer needs for the organisation are required to be on the software product.
Self Organised: Key for any software development team is for them to be self organised, self lead their work, help team with key decisions, resolve their own problems and come up with smart solutions. Principle#11 in Agile Manifesto is all about self organising teams. Agile teams operate with flat structure; there is no hierarchy in agile team structure.
Agile manifesto Principle#11 – The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organising teams
Crossfunctional: A team should have diversity of skills; all necessary specialist knowledge should be available within the team as far as possible so they can deliver the complex solutions within the same team and avoid external dependencies. This will help teams avoid bottleneck and dependency on stakeholders outside the team.
Transparent: Teams need to talk to each other, share the business goals and domain knowledge so everyone knows what their key priority is for the day, for the sprint and for the project. Transparency helps improve accountability; the project progress is shared daily with team and Product Owner. Problems are discussed and shared early before they become project-killing problems.
Courageous: Teams need to be courageous to be able to experiment and solve their own problems. Every organisation has specialist resources available for project’s rescue in difficult situations but if teams are courageous then any project problem can have tactical or strategic solution identified in no time.
Adaptive: Agile software development team need to implement faster feedback loops and be adaptive to be able to adjust their design and development effort to match what is expected by Product Owner or the customer. Self reflection is important. Can agile teams afford annual resolutions? Think about it, there needs to be continuous improvement in the way agile teams operate and function. There are many techniques available to be able to implement continuous improvement.
Flexible for changes: Agile software development teams should have smaller batch sizes and smaller queue length on their approved project backlog (or product backlog) so that business teams when in need of any urgent and unplanned user story then there is shortest possible queue length for them to wait and see their user story go live into production.
Overall, agile software development teams have to operate as one unit and bring out the best of them every day.