20 Best Practices for Agile Teams
Let’s look at some general practices for efficient, agile project management before moving on to Agile best practices for implementing each. You can even get an Agile management certification to learn professional skills. Some of the best Agile practices used for creating an effective team include:
Some more Agile practices for an effective team include –
- Build projects around motivated individuals
- Convey information face-to-face
- Form self-organizing teams
- Tasks Prioritization
- Reflect on how teams can become more effective
- Creating the sprint backlog during a planning meeting
- Encouraging self-organizing teams
- Maintain charts to monitor progress
- Sprint retrospectives to learn from the previous sprint
- Sprint reviews to present work
- Release planning meeting to create a release plan
- Cross training
- Creating an ideal Agile workspace where the team enjoys working
- Setting a sustainable pace
- Estimating the projected velocity
- Always having the customer available
- Creating spike solutions to reduce risks
- Work together with the client
- Build projects around motivated people
- Transmit information in person
1. Build projects around motivated individuals
This is undoubtedly one of the most underrated best practices of agile methodology which involves maintaining the trust and belief to keep team members exhilarated to adapt, collaborate, communicate, and achieve greater heights as they progress ahead. Organizations need to foster a culture of growth and minimize distractions to keep team members engaged in the right direction along with ensuring no disruptions to either the team, the process, or the deliverables. Team members need to collaborate as well as get their think time or my time for thoughtful and focused development.
2. Convey information face-to-face
To build trust and engage positively without any perceptions, there flourishes another important best practice of agile methodology which lays impetus on face-to-face and collaborative communication over traditional methods. Whether it involves having co-located teams in a common building or team members spread across geographies, having face-to-face communication channels opens up avenues to deeper insights, as well as helps build sustainable and persistently evolving agile teams.
3. Form self-organizing teams
Agile scrum best practices involve creating deliverables or working around team members who focus, share responsibility, adapt, and can self-organize with minimal to no supervision. Agile propagates delegation of authority and responsibility to teams to ensure they are aware and make decisions to support overall goals beyond individual aspirations. These teams can quickly acclimate to the critical needs, and feedback or avoid pitfalls by thoughtful practices and addressing the “how” work gets done.
4. Tasks Prioritization
It is one of the well-known daily scrum best practices that the product management function or the business can help teams mature on the path of agility by ensuring their bit of prioritization and detailing is done thoroughly. To support agile teams in their endeavor to thrive as a cross-functional, self-organizing, result-oriented, innovating, and problem-solving unit, the organization must lay down a framework that defines the “what” of work and keeps it detailed to form a healthy product and sprint backlog which meets the definition of ready by all means for the agile team to take up. Having a healthy product backlog is not only one of the important agile scrum best practices but also an important OKR on which an agile team is continuously assessed.
5. Reflect on how teams can become more effective
Agile teams need to constantly reflect on their ways of working to ensure the right set of agile best practices for effective team functioning are being followed and also to weed out any frictions/processes that may be slowing down productivity. While teams focus on continuous delivery, they also need to reflect on celebrating wins and improvements that can bring in innovative approaches over mundane practices. There are various formats of a retrospective that agile teams can use to master this agile best practice, they all essentially address the 3 important questions:
- What went well (What can teams continue doing)
- What can be improved (What can teams stop doing)
- Key Action Items (Takeaways/learnings to adopt changes)
6. Creating the sprint backlog during a planning meeting
The product owner presents high-priority features at these sessions, and the team answers questions and develops specific tasks for the sprint backlog.
7. Encouraging self-organizing teams
The ability to make decisions and adjust to shifting demands is a benefit of self-organizing teams. Team members offer their services instead of waiting for the team leader to assign work. This guarantees a stronger sense of dedication and ownership.
8. Maintain charts to monitor progress
Burndown charts can be kept up to date to monitor development. A burndown chart plots the amount of work remaining against the amount of time. When estimating when all of the work will be finished is quite helpful.
9. Sprint retrospectives to learn from the previous sprint
This meeting is held to review the most recent sprint and decide what could be altered to make the following sprint more fruitful.
10. Sprint reviews to present work
The team displays the product backlog items they finished during the sprint during this meeting. A PowerPoint presentation or a demonstration of fresh features could be used.
11. Release planning meeting to create a release plan
The primary goal of the release planning meeting is for the development team to estimate the number of ideal programming weeks needed to complete each user story. The customer then determines which tale has the highest priority for completion and is the most important.
12. Cross training
The project’s progress may be slowed down if only one member of your team is capable of working in a particular area and that individual decides to quit or simply has too much to accomplish. Cross-training makes your team more adaptable and helps to avoid this problem.
13. Creating an ideal Agile workspace where the team enjoys working
The following elements should be present in the ideal agile workspace:
- large, readable charts (a visual reminder of the current state of the project)
- the opportunity to observe each team member (everyone should be visible in the team workspace)
- massive whiteboards (at least one where developers may share problems and seek solutions)
- a calm and intimate setting (for relaxing, working alone or private calls)
14. Setting a sustainable pace
A manageable pace assists the team in planning releases and iterations and prevents overtime.
15. Estimating the projected velocity
Project velocity’s major goal is to assist teams in estimating how much work they can complete in a specific amount of time based on how quickly earlier iterations of the same task were finished.
16. Always having the customer available
The consumer must be accessible at all times. It is preferable to designate a customer or clients to the development team.
17. Creating spike solutions to reduce risks
A very basic software to investigate potential solutions is called a spike solution. It aids in finding solutions to challenging technical or design issues.
18. Work together with the client
When needs and wishes are met, expectations are met, and requirements are satisfied, the consumer is happy. Software engineers have devised several methods, short of mindreading, to ascertain what the customer wants and provide it. At one end of the funnel, teams often record user needs before delivering the product at the other end with little to no client engagement in between. An agile team keeps in close contact with the client to clarify expectations, work on fixes, and present possibilities that hadn’t been thought of before.
19. Build projects around motivated people
To push through a demanding development cycle and complete the work correctly, one needs motivation. Agile teams are committed to their job, laser-focused on the collective objective, and collegial. Agile teams create a fast-paced, predictable rhythm to their work when there is mutual trust and respect among the team members. It’s challenging to create an environment where this can occur.
20. Transmit information in person
Agile team members like in-person interactions, whether discussing a challenging issue with a coworker or reporting on the day’s accomplishments during a daily meeting. Progress is slowed down or blocked by information lost in a busy email box or voice mail queue. The daily meeting is the only time the complete staff gets together to discuss any problems that can result in delays.
Agile Best Practices: Scrum Project Management
Agile scrum is established as the most widely adopted and successful framework of the agile bandwagon bringing in best practices of agile into a lightweight framework for teams to fly-off with agility as they commence. Here are some top best practices adopted by scrum teams to reduce chaos:
Effective Daily Standup – The daily stand-up of any scrum team is not merely a simple scrum ceremony but, it nourishes the scrum process of the team driving effective planning, transparency, inspection, and adaptation to the team, customer, and process sentiments. Apart from being an important part of the testing practices in agile, effective daily stand-ups steer the feedback loop from strategic planning to daily planning.
Planning at all levels – A virtuous planning exercise involves team involvement at all levels of planning right from understanding the product vision to reviewing the roadmap, participation in release and iteration planning, and contribution to the daily stand-up by all team members. This encourages team members to be accountable for their activities while also allowing the core principles of the team to define the “how to” of getting things done.