ing, where enthusiasm typically hits an all-time low because the team’s skills are still low. A “demonstrating” style of leadership can be especially helpful in this stage.

After the “storm” passes, a team will move into the norming stage, where both their enthusiasm and skills are growing. Real work will get done at his point. The team leader can now act as a guide. Ultimately, the team will move into the performing stage evidenced by high skills and enthusiasm. The team leader becomes an enabler in this stage. It is the performing stage where the team is the most productive.

Eventually, the team will cease to exist and move into the adjourning stage. Ideally, this stage is done gracefully and supportively, rather than messily and destructively. The group needs a sense of closure. They need a time to pull all of their accomplishments together and be recognized for a job well done. How a group experiences their adjourning stage can have a major impact on how the group’s members will function in a future group.

Note that the first four stages of team
development form a cycle. As a team
experiences a new task for the first
time or the people on the team change,
they may well find that they will move
from the performing to forming stage
and start the cycle all over again. A well
functioning team will tend to move
through the four stages back to the
performing stage fairly quickly.

DIMENSIONS IN TEAM WORK

While the teamwork lifecycle plays an important part in understanding the tenets of agile development, one must also consider individual interactions between team members. As a group of people work together to form a team, there are three dimensions at play: social, collaborative, and task [ 3].

The social dimension deals with the interpersonal relationships between team members, which can be summarized by the terms cohesion, trust and team identity. Cohesion deals with the “closeness” of the interpersonal relationships. Team members must trust each other so they’ll feel comfortable expressing new ideas. Given time, teams take on a strong team identity. This might simply be a name or a shared sense of purpose, but often manifests itself in the physical world with team logos, mugs, and shirts, etc.

“[Agile development]
is about a method,
process, philosophy
and set of guidelines
that focuses
on customer
satisfaction, small
project teams,
informal methods,
quick incremental
delivery of software
and minimal
software engineering
work products.”

Figure 1: In an agile workflow, teams of developers move through several phases, building skills and becoming more productive along the way.

Rising Enthusiasm Growing Skills
High Enthusiasm
High Skills

Norming (Guide)

Performing (Enable)

Adjourning

How the team works together defines the collaborative dimension. Here, we’re looking at conflict and consensus. Conflict should not be viewed as a negative thing; it is simply the expression of disagreement. How that disagreement is dealt with determines if the team moves forward or backward. Functional teams learn how to grow from the inevitable conflicts and move to consensus.

The task dimension deals with de-cision-making and implementation. A team must be able to make decisions and implement them if they are to accomplish anything. The degree to which a team is able to do so determines how effective they will be.

Each of the three dimensions interacts, to some degree, with the other two. For example if a team member has a strained relationship with another team member, conflict may not be dealt with appropriately and poor decisions will be made.

Storming
(Demonstrate)

Forming

(Explain)

START
Low Enthusiasm
Low Skills
High Enthusiasm
Low Skills

EFFECTIVE TEAMS Given these models of teamwork, the agile development methodology seeks to optimize the effectiveness of teamwork and collaboration. Eric Skopec and Dayle Smith suggest there are seven indicators of effectiveness [ 8]: