Jonathan Starr wrote an excellent blog post with some musings about Scrum/Agile development use of rituals in order to create trust and collaboration between team members. I especially liked his summary of Agile Taboos:
- Thou shall not miss stand up and iteration planning.
- Thou shall not write code without unit tests.
- Thou shall not disrespect other team members.
- YAGNI
At Typemock we exercise a variation on Scrum as our development process. Reading Jonathan’s post helps you (and in our normal fasion You means Me) understand this is not just a project management methodology that Gets Things Done, but also a way to develop trust between team members and make sure the entire team is committed to the task. Through these little traditions we learn to respect our teammates and be there when the job needs doing. Jonathan’s post makes me want to improve on what we’re already doing by deepening these rituals and make sure we never break a Taboo.
