From the course: Agile Foundations

Combat groupthink

From the course: Agile Foundations

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Combat groupthink

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- One of the most important ideas in the Agile Manifesto is that teams should favor individuals and interactions over processes and tools. The original work group that developed the Agile Manifesto put a lot of emphasis on how team members communicate. That's because they knew that most software projects fail, not because of some overwhelming technical challenge, instead, these projects fail because of bad communication. They thought the fix for this was putting much more emphasis on face-to-face interactions. But why do you think that is? I mean, face-to-face meetings aren't the only way to improve your communication. Why do you need to be in the same room? The reason is that face-to-face communication and cross-functional, self-organized teams are actually closely related. Remember that Agile Teams want to distribute their expertise to everyone else in the team. Everyone on an Agile Team should always be teaching and learning. That's usually quite a bit different from how most teams operate. Typically, they'll be an expert whose opinion has much more weight. So a database developer might just let everyone know what they're doing with the database. But when that happens, it gets really difficult for a team to have a shared understanding about the product. They could end up doing something called, Groupthink. That's when a few experts make a convincing argument and the rest of the team just follows along. Something like, "Sam says it's a good idea, so it must be right." An Agile Team should avoid Groupthink, because everyone should be able to ask challenging questions about the product. That means that a tester should be able to ask a database developer about their design of the database. On an Agile Team, if you can't simply explain your thinking to someone else, then it's probably not a well-designed solution. So the team should always be having these face-to-face meetings where everyone's contributing their ideas and asking challenging questions. It's a key part of being a self-organized team.

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