Building Agile Teams

Question 1

Servant leadership

Answer 1

The practice of leading through service to the team, understanding and addressing their needs to enable the highest team performance.

Question 2

What is the role of the servant leader?

Answer 2

To facilitate the team’s discovery and definition of agile, approaching the work by purpose, people, and process.

Question 3

Purpose

Answer 3

The why and goal or reason for being.

Question 4

People

Answer 4

Encouraging an environment where everyone can contribute and succeed.

Question 5

Process

Answer 5

It doesn’t have to be perfect; look for results. The cross-functional team often delivers finished value and reflects on the product and the process.

Question 6

Servant leader responsibilites

Answer 6

Facilitate, remove impediments, grow the team, and pave the way for others’ contribution.

Question 7

Remove impediments

Answer 7

Remove clockers and bottlenecks and bring dependencies into the team.

Question 8

WIP

Answer 8

Work in progress

Question 9

Pairing

Answer 9

Working in pairs to complete, check and learn together.

Question 10

Swarming

Answer 10

Multiple members getting around a problem to solve it quickly.

Question 11

Mobbing

Answer 11

Teams working closely together around a core outcome.

Question 12

Cross-functional team member

Answer 12

Typically developers, business analysts, designers, testers, SMEs, or anyone with the skills necessary to produce a working product.

Question 13

Product owner

Answer 13

Responsible for guiding the direction of the product towards the highest value for the customer. Prioritizing and reprioritizing increments, giving high-level requirements, balancing benefit vs. effort.

Question 14

Team facilitator

Answer 14

Team coach, team lead, project manager, scrum master, or servant leader. They focus on facilitation, helping the team gather answers, reduce impediments, bottlenecks and blockers to the work.

Question 15

The whole team approach

Answer 15

When possible, bringing external dependencies from outside the team to inside the team helps increase knowledge sharing and collaboration, increases dedication, reduces task-switching, and speeds up output.

Question 16

Early and frequent feedback

Answer 16

Early feedback on the product through small deliveries and the process through retrospectives speeds and increases learning for future releases.

Question 17

Sticky/stable teams

Answer 17

Small teams of 3-12 people funded and formed around a core discipline, feature set or area. They build up a high level of expertise in that area over time, ensuring work flows more smoothly.

Question 18

Continuous integration

Answer 18

Code is merged regularly (daily when possible) and regression tested, often automatically, to catch any defects as a whole.

Question 19

Rolling wave planning

Answer 19

Future features are created and estimated on broadly at first, then broken down and elaborated in detail the closer they get to being worked on. Estimates and acceptance criteria become more refined with each pass.

Question 20

Build in quality

Answer 20

Quality should always be top of mind. Technical debt should always be top of mind and reduced during solution and development. Refactor regularly, a slack card of 3 to 5 points can be added to a spring for technical debt, that drops off if other urgent cards arise. Use peer review, test-first (test driven development) and simple solutions over complex ones.

Question 21

Visual management

Answer 21

Team information is clearly available to all - including backlog, sprint Kanban board, product roadmap, and team velocity.