Team Agreements

I would like to point out one practice that my agile coaches (Shama Bole and Grant Beck with Plaster Group Consulting) introduced me to, and that is the concept of a Team Agreement. A Team Agreement is not specific to scrum and can be used by any team. It is basically a short list of items that the team agrees to. It works because the team determines the list, not management, and the team can change them if they are no longer fit for purpose. A few examples are shared below:

• We will honor our commitments in a Sprint to the best of our ability: Teams that are new to scrum can be slow to realize that taking on a task is a commitment to completing it: don’t commit if you don’t honestly feel you can do the work in the planned time or have bandwidth to take it on.
• If a user story is not in the sprint, we will not work on it: The next technical story or user story in the backlog may be more interesting than the ones in the current sprint and developers can be tempted to stray.
• We will raise questions/issues early rather than waiting for the next stand up, team meeting, etc.
• We will favor face-to-face communication.
• We will be positive.
• We will regularly update our scrum tool.
• We will be on time for meetings.
• Laptop-free meetings: The team may designate certain meetings as laptop-free.
• Everything we do that could impact production data and/or code must be reviewed by someone else.
• We will not commit to stories that do not have adequate requirements.
• We all take responsibility and ownership for remembering and acting on issues and ideas.