Chapter 11. Improving Our Team Dynamics to Increase Our Agility

Agile Software teams often work closely together and the communication lines between the team members are open and of high bandwidth. For team members new to Agile, they can often find this daunting because they aren’t used to the level of scrutiny and transparency from their peers. If team members previously worked independently or in different teams, when they come together as a new team, they may find that their individual ways of working may not fit with the team norm.

There will often be a period where the team has to iron out their differences before they can start working harmoniously together. As discussed in Chapter 5, Bootstrap Teams with Liftoffs, liftoffs can help teams get off to a good start, but eventually, teams will begin to go through a “storming” phase with different degrees of conflict occurring as teams try to reach a consensus on how to work together.

The first part of this chapter looks at how to help the...