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:

(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.)

14 Responses to “The seven pillars of an Agile team: Introduction”

  1. Melissa Says:

    Supportive Culture is so important it’s listed twice? or is that a error?

  2. Brian Marick Says:

    Melissa: fixed. The second was supposed to be “self improvement”.

  3. shino.de Says:

    Facets of an Agile Team…

    Brian Marick started a series of blog posts on the seven pillars of an Agile team. Brian, ……

  4. Simon Godfrey Says:

    I’d like to think these could be the seven pillars of any successful test team, irrespective of methodology.

  5. Dew Drop - June 11, 2009 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew Says:

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  6. Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » The focus on business value pillar (version 1) Says:

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  7. Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » The “product sense” pillar (version 1) Says:

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  8. Huseyin Angay Says:

    Looks like you have discovered the OpenUP practices ;-)
    Product Sense = Shared Vision
    Focus on Business Value = Risk-Value Lifecycle
    The rest = Whole Team

  9. Brian Marick Says:

    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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    […] The Seven Pillars of an Agile Team: What are the abilities that team members need to posses? Product Sense, Collaboration, Focus on Business Value, Supportive Culture, Confidence, Technical Excellence, Self Improvement. […]

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