As organizations adopt agile practices, there are several key skills that differentiate high-performing teams from mediocre teams:

1) Working in short timeboxes

For a team that is accustomed to delivering working code every six or eight months, two or four week long iterations can be unfathomable. But doing this is essential to the success of the project in order to get the benefits of continuous code integration into a testing environment and frequent user feedback. The sprint’s timebox forces the business stakeholders to constantly question the scope of each feature at a micro level and decide when to carve out functionality.

2) Splitting work into small pieces

The most common excuse for teams wanting to plan sprints using large user stories is that it is “more efficient” to do all of the coding work together and test it at the very end or in the next sprint. This perceived efficiency is self-deception. Successful agile teams know that they must put working code in front of their users early and often. Remember the old saying that “users often don’t know their requirements until the software fails to meet them?”

3) Communication and transparency

Old-school silos between IT, Product/Marketing, and business operations groups are an agile anti-pattern. Political games, finger pointing, and one-upmanship are a huge waste of an organization’s resources and energy. A grown-up culture of transparency allows all of these players to collaborate and solve difficult challenges. For the Scrum Master, this means posting project information in high-traffic areas of the office. More importantly, it means being open with stakeholders about the challenges that the team or project is encountering. Team members can feel secure speaking freely about impediments and project risks in a public forum without fear of reprisal. The essential skill here is knowing how to voice issues in a way that does not sugar-coat them but does set the stage for a constructive discussion.

4) Swarming, collaboration, team first

“Your side of the boat might be leaking but my side is fine” attitude just doesn’t cut it anymore. Lone gunmen need not apply. The most effective agile team members will gladly work outside of their skill sets and comfort zones if it helps the team succeed. Agile developers welcome and seek opportunities to discuss functionality with end users to understand their goals and needs. They leverage techniques such as User Acceptance Test Cases to capture and understand detailed requirements.

5) Focus and finish mindset

This is another one of those things that is counter-intuitive at first for people new to agile. Coders are used to getting all the coding tasks done so that they can get all of the stuff to the testers. Understanding that high work in process = low throughput is key. Developers working in lockstep with testers results in higher throughput, even if that means that the developers have to swarm on non-development tasks every now and then.

6) Scope negotiation

Scope negotiation means being relentless both when talking about items in the current sprint or when doing release planning. Sometimes it takes two, three, or four conversations about an item to admit that it is not really needed.

7) Talking about requirements at the right level of detail at the right point in time

Skilled agilists recognize that the conversation that happens in a user story writing workshop is at a much higher level than the conversation about a story right before that story is pulled into a sprint. They also shun detailed requirements until the sprint starts, knowing that a large collection of detailed requirements is inventory that is subject to decay.

8) Automated testing

Refactoring is a fact of life as requirements are progressively elaborated. Effective implementation of test-driven development and automated testing blunts the effort for regression testing as the application evolves.