Building Agile Teams Flashcards
Servant leadership
The practice of leading through service to the team, understanding and addressing their needs to enable the highest team performance.
What is the role of the servant leader?
To facilitate the team’s discovery and definition of agile, approaching the work by purpose, people, and process.
Servant leader responsibilites
Facilitate, remove impediments, grow the team, and pave the way for others’ contribution.
What does remove impediments mean?
Remove blockers and bottlenecks and bring dependencies into the team.
WIP
Work in progress
Pairing
Working in pairs to complete, check and learn together.
Swarming
Multiple members getting around a problem to solve it quickly.
Mobbing
Teams working closely together around a core outcome.
Cross-functional team member
Typically developers, business analysts, designers, testers, SMEs, or anyone with the skills necessary to produce a working product.
Product owner
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.
Team facilitator
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.
The whole team approach
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.
Early and frequent feedback
Early feedback on the product through small deliveries and the process through retrospectives speeds and increases learning for future releases.
Sticky/stable teams
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.
Continuous integration
Code is merged regularly (daily when possible) and regression tested, often automatically, to catch any defects as a whole.
Rolling wave planning
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.
Build in quality
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.
Visual management
Team information is clearly available to all - including backlog, sprint Kanban board, product roadmap, and team velocity.
