Articles and videos on creating and managing cross-functional Scrum teams: scrum master, product owner and development team.
Building great teams isn’t just something that managers do alone, with spreadsheets and workflows and process documents. Great teams come from the participation of the group to push the team there. This presentation discusses how you can think about your role in creating a high-performance team, whatever your job title is.
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development says that you should prefer “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. But how do you hire the right people for your Scrum software development projects. In her article “Hiring for Agility – Mindset Matters in an Agile Organisation”, Nadia Smith suggests that you should look for more for Agility than Agile.
After presenting some basic retrospective techniques in the first part of this article, Jesus Mendez provides in the second part some additional techniques that focuses on the facilitating part of the Scrum sprint retrospectives.
As stated in the Agile Manifesto, Agile software development is about “Individuals and interactions”. The importance of having a performing team where individuals collaborate is an essential factor for the success of software development projects. In his “Forming Agile Teams Workbook”, Jesus Mendez provides some tools that offer an alternative-proven way to add more structure, transparency and visibility to formation of Agile teams.
The Agile Manifesto says that “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation”, but many meetings are a dull waste of time, even for Scrum teams.
Allan Kelly outlines the #NoProjects agenda and discusses the role of teams as the unit of production and the team life cycle. Good projects make for bad software. Software which is useful is used and demands change, stop changing it and you kill it. In a world without projects how do you manage work? The answer is teams. Teams are the means of production, work should be based around teams and teams should be stable.
Let’s challenge some of the commonly accepted patterns for software development teams. High degree of autonomy doesn’t turn into anarchy but rather help to keep intrinsic motivation high. Participatory leadership means that every team member is a leader yet it doesn’t mean competition. Decisions making process has nothing to do with power structures. Culture is paramount and it goes ahead of technical skills. Collaboration is ultimately the factor the whole team optimizes their work for.
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