Preconditions For Agility

Joshua Kerievsky writes about the conditions you want in place before you start the sprint. If you start by addressing some of the common impediments to a successful sprint you are more likely to have a quick start.

Here are two of his five preconditions for agility:

Cross-functional team: From the start, you want to have a cross-functional team of people with cross-functional skills. This means the team has all the skills to turn the sprint backlog into working software.

Limit work-in-process: Limit the number of user stories that can be inflight at the same time. This constraint forces the team to collaborate and focus on completing a story before jumping to the next.