The SKR World

As the team reached norming stage and adjust their behavior to each others. The team in this stage agrees to a set of rules, values, professional behavior, and, shared working methods and tools. The team in this stage starts trusting each other. The team behaves amicably before establishing the trust.

Alistair Cockburn in his book “Agile Software development” defines amicability as:

“Amicability is the willingness of people to hear the thoughts of another person
with good will and to speak without malice.”

Lets consider a scenario of hierarchical team organization (which typically has top-down chain of command) where a senior programmer is paired with programmer. The programmer might tend to agree with the senior programmer (cause can be various) even when he can provide constructive suggestions. This will surely degrade the quality of deliverables.

The constructive amicable disagreement should be encouraged in an organization for better performance of the team. Sometimes it can be useful to induce amicable disagreement in the team so that the team can share their views. Or the culture of constructive critical feedback should be encouraged in the project team.

Labels: Agile, Team Building