Seven Agile Team Practices that Scale

Via AgileJournal:  Seven Agile Team Practices that Scale

This is a great piece that could be used as a primer to distribute to new customers and teams you’re trying to win-over into the agile column to help them stop their losses using tired, thrash-and-burn, over-the-cubicle-wall, hit-and-run, command-and-control practices.  Read the article for explanations for each:

1. Iteration Foundation
2. The Define-Build-Test Component Team
3. Smaller and More Frequent Releases
4. Two-Level Planning
5. Concurrent Testing
6. Continuous Integration
7. Regular Reflection and Adaptation

These are the practices of world-class, top-flight teams.  They’re easy to talk about, tough to put into practice because it’s hard work and unfortunately there’s a lot of folks who’d rather wring their hands than get to it.  It’s precisely the reason why, I suspect, Ken Schwaber recently opined on Twitter, “Picking places to use Scrum? Look for projects where everyone's on board. Otherwise you waste time/resources dealing with malcontents.”

This said, I believe any team can aspire to these practices and do them to a fairly high degree of competency.  Just like getting off the couch and doing a run can have immediate benefits to your health, teams that start to employ these practices can begin to realize a complete change in how they deliver value that, quite simply, will leave their competition in the dust.