Steve starts asking about the agreements proposed in his first area of interest: the daily Scrum start time. After all possible working arrangements, it uses the Decision-making Protocol[2] to quickly seek consensus. If there is no immediate consensus, the person who said “no” to an idea suggests what they think is better. When several people have a problem, everyone is supposed to offer a better idea. If too many people say no, the applicant should consider withdrawing the proposal. In the case of Steve`s team, the team has its first work arrangements after 20 minutes: have everyone work on your work arrangement – all members of the agile team must be present when it is created. No one can impose it – not even the Product Owner or the Scrum Master, every team must feel responsible. Coding standards must be agreed in Sprint Zero. Sometimes not all team members have read the document that lists the coding standards. The entire team should schedule a meeting to discuss and understand these coding standards. If you use a large policy and place your employment contract in a public place, you need to keep it simple. Otherwise, you will have the whole room covered with working arrangements.
Short rules are also easier to follow, so don`t develop them – encourage your teams to use short sentences when training their practices. In the event of a tie for a majority vote, ask the team if members would like to adjust their vote based on additional information. This significantly reduces the time required. There are various joint agreements that remain tacit, but that the team should review from time to time. The team must ensure that it maintains the minimum amount of work, focuses on the backlog of the sprint rather than other unrelated elements, and follows and practices agile values and principles. To avoid confusion, the Daily Scrum should be done in the same place every day. Distributed teams can use online meeting services. Other work modalities include: “Documentation for critical tasks” (the team schedules them as a subtask in the schedule, if necessary) and “Identify dependencies” (to identify dependencies early on and document them on tickets, whether in prospective meetings or planning meetings). Here are some important things to keep in mind when creating your own team agreement. Another agreement may be to have a user story demonstration performed by the product owner, followed by a breakdown of tasks. This has the advantage that the product owner is involved when the task breakdown is complete and can clarify any issues that arise when assigning tasks. The team can schedule short breaks after 20-30% of capacity is covered.
Here are some of the answers you might expect in the brainstorming category. Note that some are too specific or process-oriented to be work arrangements. Once the whole team is clear about what each post-it note means, ask them to rate each standard on the next scale. Thumbs up ( ) for full approval, neutral face ( ) for questions or thumbs down ( 👍🏼 😐 👎🏼 ) for disagreements. Here, however, is the trap in case of disagreement; If someone disagrees, they need to suggest something better. If you have a small team (4 people or less), ask each person to write two agreements. Agile teams are known for being productive and achieving great results. But each team working on a project is a set of personalities who may encounter difficulties in collaboration and communication. Regularly review your team`s working arrangements, especially if the team or work changes or if an agreement can no longer be respected. Openness: When we work together, we practice expressing how we are doing and what stands in our way.
We are learning that it is good to express concerns so that they can be addressed. Scrum teams are self-organized and cross-functional. Self-organized teams decide how best to do their job instead of being led by others outside the team. To get organized, a team must go through different stages of team development. Your teamwork agreement must be easily accessible and maintainable for all team members. It`s easy to forget something you`ve only seen once in a meeting. Find creative ways to consistently incorporate the key points of your agreement into your team`s focus. One way to do this is to create some kind of mural in the main workspace where the instructions will be displayed. The goal of the exercise is to get a boost from all team members for all agreements. The working arrangements must be reviewed at the end of each sprint during the retrospective. Once team members feel that they are doing well with an agreement and there is something else that needs to be addressed/discussed and added as a working arrangement, they can replace it with another agreement by consensus.
Read each agreement aloud, then vote as a team to commit to the agreement. Backlog refinement is a joint effort involving the moderator (ScrumMaster), representatives of the management team (Product Owner) and the development team. It is important to have some basic user stories with defined points in order to make a relative comparison of the stories to be estimated. All team members must agree on these basic user stories. In the next retrospective, Steve mentions some of these topics and says he wants to talk about improving their environment. It has been observed in various projects that when the team holds the sprint planning meeting, there are members who have not read and understood the story once. All team members participating in sprint planning meetings should read and understand some of the highest priority product backlog stories that need to be agreed upon as entry criteria for the sprint planning meeting. The product owner must ensure that there is enough tiered backlog available for the team to go through before the sprint begins. The role of the Scrum Master can be constructive in creating a work arrangement – the main task being to identify the initial need for it. You should then suggest that the team write their own work agreement and explain what it is and what benefits it has.
