What does an Agile Team look like?

Thanks to some friends and colleagues at Rally for sharing this from Liz Keogh's work.


This is a great tool to use when trying to assess where a team is in their agile adoption.  It be used as a guide for periodic retrospectives and even goal setting for teams looking to move to the next level as they grow as a team.
 
Novice

• We have a board
• We put our stories on the board
• Every two weeks, we get together and celebrate what we've done
• Sometimes we talk to the stakeholders about it
• We think we might miss our deadline and have told our PM
• Agile is really hard to do well

Beginner

• We are trying to deliver working software
• We hold retrospectives to talk about what made us unhappy
• When something doesn't work, we ask our coach what to do about it
• Our coach gives us good ideas
• We have delegated someone to deal with our offshore communications
• We have a great BA who talks to the stakeholders a lot
• We know we're going to miss our deadline; our PM is on it
• Agile requires a great deal of discipline

Practitioner

• We know that our software will work in production
• Every two weeks, we show our working software to the stakeholders
• We talk to the stakeholders about the next set of stories they wants us to do
• We have established a realistic deadline and are happy that we'll make it
• We have some good ideas of our own
• We deal with blockers promptly
• We write unit tests
• We write acceptance tests
• We hold retrospectives to work out what stopped us delivering software
• We always know what 'done' looks like before we start work
• We love our offshore team members; we know who they are and what they look like and talk to them every day
• Our stakeholders are really interested in the work we're doing
• We always have tests before we start work, even if they're manual
• We've captured knowledge about how to deploy our code to production
• Agile is a lot of fun 
• Knowledgeable
• We are going to come well within our deadline
• Sometimes we invite our CEO to our show-and-tell, so he can see what Agile looks like done well
• People applaud at the end of the show-and-tell; everyone is very happy
• That screen shows the offshore team working; we can talk to them any time; they can see us too
• We hold retrospectives to celebrate what we learnt
• We challenge our coach and change our practices to help us deliver better
• We run the tests before we start work - even the manual tests, to see what's broken and know what will be different when we're done
• Agile is applicable to more than just software delivery 

 Expert

• We go to conferences and talk about our fantastic Agile experiences
• We are helping other teams go Agile
• Business outside of IT are really interested in what we're doing
• We regularly revisit our practices, and look at other teams to see what they're doing
• The company is innovative and fun
• The company are happy to try things out and get quick feedback
• We never have to work late or weekends
• We deploy to production every two weeks
• Agile is really easy when you do it well!