The seven pillars of an Agile team: Introduction
A couple of months ago, Chet Hendrickson, Ron Jeffries, Bob Martin, James Shore, and I met to talk about what abilities are important to an Agile team. We cardstormed ideas, which fell into seven categories:
- Product sense
- Collaboration
- Focus on Business Value
- Supportive Culture
- Confidence
- Technical Excellence
- Self-Improvement
(I’ve added words to a few of the names.)
Three times now, I’ve facilitated a retrospective in which teams rated their abilities in each of the categories, displayed the different ratings on a spider graph, and then discussed the result. I think the results were good enough that I can imagine a team doing it every few months or so.
One difficulty I had with the retrospectives was explaining the categories well. (What does it mean to have “product savvy”?) For my use and yours, I’ll be writing a series of blog posts with the explanations I should have had ready-to-hand.
Important: These essays are my interpretations of the ability clusters. Not only are they infected by my own biases and obsessions, I’ve reclustered the cards slightly. For example, part of the reason “product savvy” was hard to explain is that it overlapped with “Business Value” and “Confidence”. While I’m sure the category boundaries could never be made clear-cut (PDF), I’m trying to sharpen them a bit.
So give credit to all five of us for the good parts, and blame the bad parts on me alone.
(I am also to blame for the “seven pillars” bit.)
June 10th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Supportive Culture is so important it’s listed twice? or is that a error?
June 10th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Melissa: fixed. The second was supposed to be “self improvement”.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:44 am
Facets of an Agile Team…
Brian Marick started a series of blog posts on the seven pillars of an Agile team. Brian, ……
June 11th, 2009 at 5:54 am
I’d like to think these could be the seven pillars of any successful test team, irrespective of methodology.
June 11th, 2009 at 7:39 am
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June 12th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Looks like you have discovered the OpenUP practices ;-)
Product Sense = Shared Vision
Focus on Business Value = Risk-Value Lifecycle
The rest = Whole Team
June 12th, 2009 at 6:58 am
Huseyin: No discovery here. These aren’t original. People have known this stuff for years, but it hasn’t been written down in this form, with this intent.
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