AGILE IN ACTION

Collaboration is critical to high performance teams and maintaining high performance is important for sustaining effective collaboration. Has collaboration become one of those words that has lost meaning because it’s being used too much? Is all work collaboration? In the agile world it sounds like collaboration is ubiquitous. But are we actually collaborating?

If you're working towards a key release, the pressure mounts for everyone involved as it approaches. For the technical team responsible for delivery the rising pressure in this situation is nearly always negative if left unchecked. As time runs out the drumbeat gets faster and faster as the team is whipped up to ramming speed, a bit like the galley slaves in Ben Hur.

Presented at the Agile Evangelists Meetup:

I mentioned before that I've been reading Artful Making. Well I've just finished it. The final chapter struck a particular chord with me, ending the book on a high. I felt that, in many respects parts of it described (what I like to think) is my approach to working with teams:

I really like the idea of having a team norm in place to help deal with interpersonal conflict. The norm would require the people involved in the conflict, as part of their membership of the team, to work together (with the help of a facilitator; aka Scrum Master) to find the root cause of their conflict. Basically get in a room and work it out before the conflict gets bigger and pulls the whole team down. The people involved are required to bring their analysis and agreement to the next retrospective and report it to the team so that everyone learns from the experience.

I talk a lot about facilitating self-organizing teams. For a Scrum Master, a little more than facilitation skills and authority for the process is needed to ensure people interact with professionalism and demonstrate the right behaviors - respect, humility, empathy - at all times.

In our team, developers create the vast majority of the automated tests, whether they are acceptance tests, integration tests, or unit tests. They do this because they are story test-driven. They develop stories from the outside in, starting with the user interface and are guided by the acceptance criteria. The developers profile their code and create automated performance and load tests as they go because code has to be production-ready at the end of every 1-week iteration. Testers in our team do exploratory testing and they're free to pair-up with anyone, another tester or more likely a developer, to create any automated tests they feel are missing. The testers, however, add value to the team that goes way beyond testing. Working closely with the Product Owner they facilitate connection and collaboration with the customer, helping the team to empathize with users, understand their needs and appreciate value from their perspective. Working with the facilitator they help the team develop a conscience that is focused on the delivery of value and quality, while their continuous interactions within the team keep collaboration high.

The product stream concept is a simple one. A product stream contains a self-organizing team and a product owner, yet it engages with the Business more deeply than just having business representation in the Product Owner. Engagement is the wrong word, I suppose, because it's more than that. Software development is absorbed back into the Business. It's no longer just aligned, it's integrated; it's part of the business.

If you're an business analyst and you're performing the role of Product Owner on an agile team, focus on: