The role of a team lead in agile environment
Posted on | January 21, 2008 |
I think pure waterfall model is impractical. It is as impractical as the pendulum in pure physics where the thread is of no weight and no friction exists. And that is what you can never have in the lab.
We, the software developers know there is always ‘friction’ and nothing is ‘massless’. The ever changing nature of the human mind and limitation to perceive what it needs results in modification in the requirement. That why we are agile, we don’t just fall.
Now, trust and sense of responsibility are at the base of agile methodologies among some other. Here, every member in a team is expected to be self driven and self motivated. They are given task and set free to accomplish that at their own choice. Formal managing, let alone macro managing, hardly gets its place. Then what would the team-lead do ? Should s/he dive into developing? or is there indeed any need of a team leader?
Actually, there is an unavoidable need of the team-lead-role. And s/he should never dive into developing unless it is that required. Rather, he(please add an ’s’ before ‘h’, I’m lazy.) role is to keep all his mets connected as well observe aspect of their work.
Team-Lead role is almost similar to the role of the wicket keeper in cricket; cheering up the players and catch all the balls behind. A team lead should also look for the quality and security of the code component. As well, he will also ensure development path is not deviated from the path. As we are talking about agile methodologies, change may come, but that change should be verified by the team lead.
Besides, the team lead should accumulate the knowledge learned by each of the team members. He is to somehow implement the notion of adaptive software development(ASD proposed by Jim Highsmith) i.e. focus on collaboration and learning. He is to arrange an meeting to share the knowledge of the team mets. It can be in lunch time, can be after lunch hour or whenever seems appropriate. Remember, there is no need to prepare presentation as it often time consuming and deviates the concentration from the development. Main idea is to use any wheel if developed already by a team.
One point must be concerned about at this regard is to maintain the motivation and positive team spirit. Say two techniques are developed by two of the team members for similar type of problem. Both the developers are smart and techniques are smart too. Now, to server in future which method is to be used? The team lead should carefully analyze(don’t take too much time, if not resolved drop it till a right time) the two techniques with participation of them and expectedly he should sort out the right one and has to convince both of them positively.
Always keep in concern to maintain the team spirit and motivation.
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6 Responses to “The role of a team lead in agile environment”
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February 25th, 2008 @ 8:50 pm
thanks for your nice write up,
team leader is a bridge between scrum master and development team, who communicate with team members and convert backlog to an implementable, deliverable module.
team members are like leader who leads his team to build something measurable. he usually think from the more inside, more bottom up approached are seen on his work.
usually in agile team leader is playing an important role to understand team motivation and work load, he might play enough to estimate the work.
though agile doesn’t define team leader in different way, but usually senior or experienced developer are encouraged to become team leader.
team leader needs to be sophisticated in knowledge and more domain centric experience. skill on pretending and estimating the work and understanding the team members sounds good enough.
best wishes,
February 25th, 2008 @ 11:29 pm
Thank you Hasan for your comment. It extended the post value and my understanding too :).
All the best.
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April 6th, 2008 @ 11:17 am
Looks perfectly straight to me. Of course, I’m also the type of person who allegedly [ahem! allegedly] agree with everything.
April 9th, 2008 @ 2:21 am
Please stop saying stupid things! After reading your posts I want to laugh! You are trying to act and talk like an experienced person, but it does not work in your case. You can’t imagine how funny you look. I didn’t want to say anything bad but words just came out of my mouth! You must be crazy!