Team manifesto

In one great team I worked with, we generated this manifesto. It’s extremely valuable, because it was not created in one day, it’s a result of 2 years of regular retrospectives and analysis of mistakes (hey guys I don’t mention you, tell me if I can reveal team name here).

We value

• Teamwork
• Team Spirit
• Communication
• Team communication (fast response, helpful team)
• Daily standups getting shorter
• Over-delivery
• Commitment to stick to estimates
• Quality of planning session
• knowledge sharing (avoiding having specialist)
• Sharing interesting technical stuff
• Delivery
• Sharing work
• Feeling responsibility for the product
• Challenging work
• Support from the team for the new member

New team members:

• No tight deadlines for new guys

General:

• Sharing future plans

Code:

• Follow the Code Style
• Automating of code style checks
• Code review very constructive
• Don’t have a feeling of guilt for not reviewing immediately
• Care about backward-compatibility
• Don’t do premature code reuse/optimisation

Tests:

• Check your test coverage
• We don’t merge code without good tests

Pull requests:

• Nominate reviewers for you pull request
• When creating a Pull request please provide a description
• Always notify reviewers about your pull request

Visibility:

• Task statuses in task tracker should be updated more frequently

Tasks:

• Provide more business knowledge before introducing the user story
• Better splitting of user stories: splitting is important to understand story
• Split tasks into small 1-day pieces
• Don’t blindly accept “I don’t need help. It’s not parallelazible”
• Don’t be to eager with your user stories. Share them. One completed story is more valuable than 2 uncompleted
• Be pragmatic instead of increasing the scope
• Define interfaces between related work accomplished by several devs
• Splitting is important to understand story

Meetings:

• Introduce breaks in long meetings to recharge
• Provide agenda for planning session
• Improve the quality of stand-ups (big picture for entire team)
• Keep the meetings structured, and timeboxed
• Make sure all the participants in a discussion are on the same page
• Take notes during discussions

Estimates:

• If task takes more time than expected — bring team to re-estimate
• Spend some to understand the topic before diving into coding immediately
• Never start working on an unestimated story
• If you’re stuck — don’t dig to long, ask for help after 2 hrs max

Help:

• Don’t ignore your team mates
• Ask for help more directly
• Don’t let team mates wait for reviews too long
• Support your mates. Suggest at least a direction to dig if you don’t know the exact answer.
• Try pair programming to get better understanding
• Be a trustworthy team member

Technologies:

• Introducing a new technology into the stack should be validated by product needs
• Include all team members in decisions which affect the whole team
• It’s fun to work with new technologies

Online presence:

• Tell when you go offline so that team understands if you’re online

I think this manifesto is great =) Couldn’t stop myself from sharing.