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Formulate Effective Ways of Working for Your Agile Teams
A non-exhaustive but essential set of principles that you need to establish with your agile teams
Why Are “Ways of Working” Important?
When running your team’s day-to-day operations, having an agreed manifesto of Ways of Working will help keep the engine running as smoothly as possible. Codifying this in a readily available document makes it handy to remind the team what the agreed ways of working are.
The agreed “Ways of Working” manifesto should be readily available to remind the team how to work effectively together. It will be a living document that has to be updated continuously based on your team’s situation. Ways of Working usually are initiated during an agile team’s kickoff. Ideally, during sprint retrospectives, health checks, and team refresh sessions, the updates to Ways of Working are best discussed.
As an engineering manager or lead, you need to help your team/s in establishing ways of working early on, ensuring that the team is set up for success in their sprints — these ways of working need to align with your organization’s engineering principles and production standards.
The team in this context refers to the smallest unit of a group of people in an organization. For example, if you are using the tribes and squads model, then the squad is the equivalent of a team in this write up.
Let’s cover the essential Ways of Working principles in the next sections.
1. Definitions of Ticket or Card Statuses
When working on a ticket, the definition of Done is essential; however, what In Progress and Ready for Development means are also important. When reporting the status of the task assigned to you, sometimes it can be vague what that exactly means for other team members if its meaning is not correctly defined. We can be as specific as we can on the status or swimlanes depending on the tool we are using. But we can only have as many swimlanes that we are allowed to…
