How to build a kick-ass agile team

Once the team is in place, it's important to remember that agile teams are like individuals: they take time to grow. Agile theorists often quote Tuckman's "stages of group development.” Agile teams go through four key phases as they develop.

After a team reaches the performing stage, development truly becomes awesome. Members trust each other, understand one another's strengths, and use that understanding to optimize how they build software.

Keeping agile teams intact takes some organizational discipline, but it pays to protect the team–within reason, of course. When change is introduced (new hire, employee departure, etc.), the team reverts back to the forming stage as it absorbs the change.

High-performing agile teams are also built on sound engineering practices like code reviews, task branching, continuous integration, and regular release cadences. We can't stress this enough: engineering fundamentals are crucial for building great teams. (Read more on those topics in our "Agile Developer" section.)

There are two other pillars of great agile teams: continuous mentoring and shared skill sets. One of the big benefits in working on a team is that colleagues learn from one another and mentor one another. Mentoring isn't just an activity for junior members to learn from senior members. Everyone on the team learns from one another so that the impact of the team as a whole is greater than the sum of the impact made by it's individual members. Meanwhile, shared skill sets unlock the power of the team to tackle heterogeneous work. As engineers, it's always important to learn new skills because it makes us more valuable to the organization and better equipped to support each other's work. It also guards against someone becoming a critical path, which takes a load off everyone's mind.

Today's software teams include product managers, designers, marketers, and operations as well as developers and testers. At Atlassian, we focus our agile teams around three product phases: make, sell, and operate.

Each product phase is supported by three teams (ideally 5-7 members each), and forms a triad. Each triad is agile in its approach, because as the product develops, teams are continuously working on each phase and learning more about the product as well as the market. Below is a breakdown of each triad and the who, what, where, and why for each team within the larger software team.