White Paper –
Are all pigs equal? – or are some more equal than others?
Agile projects are highly-dependent on the people who work on them – in practice they often decide the success or failure of a project.
From a management perspective it is therefore really important to both get suitable people to work on your agile project(s) and to keep them. But it is not enough to simply employ good people; you also need to ensure you get the right mix of skills and personalities.
Similarly, an individual who works (or wants to work) on agile projects has the challenge of ensuring that they possess the right skills to make them effective team members and/or attractive new employees.
This paper looks at the mix of roles and capabilities that make up typical agile teams, how these differ from traditional projects and how the available range of skills and distribution of responsibilities among team members affects the structure and success of the agile team. It also considers why communication may be different in traditional and agile projects, and how to introduce ways of working in an agile team to enhance communication and optimise performance.
It finally considers how agile team roles affect the motivation of team members (typically testers, developers and business analysts, but also perhaps the users) and explores means of increasing motivation from the perspective of both agile management and the individual.
Note: The paper includes a tongue-in-cheek questionnaire at the end for testers to decide if they are suitable for working on agile projects. This is not intended to be taken as seriously as some readers have assumed in the past.
