Six Behaviors to Consider for an Agile Team

anyone sees it are not well suited to an agile team.

One of the series of questions you can ask is "Tell me how you like to work. Think back to the last feature you worked on. Did you try to finish the whole thing before you asked for feedback?" Wait for the answer. Now, ask, "Why?" The candidate might tell you he or she had one shot at getting feedback. Or the candidate might say he or she was expected to complete everything perfectly. Now you can ask, "When you work on your projects outside of work, how do you work?"

4. People Who are Willing To Do Something That is Good Enough for Now
Similarly people who are able to take small steps and get feedback might also be willing to do something that is good enough for now. One of the problems in agile is we don't have time to do everything perfectly at one time. That's why we use timeboxes. We do what's needed for now, and based on feedback decide whether or when to return to it later.

The ability to do something that is just good enough for now and come back to it later, when doing so has more business value, is not a common behavior. You can see this in testers who want the absolute best test system at the beginning of the project. You can see this in architects who want to fully define the architecture at the beginning of the project.

One of the problems of agile is that we cannot tell what will be perfect at the very beginning of the project. Sometimes, we can't tell in the middle either! So, we need to do something that is good enough for now and come back to it later when we will get more business value from focusing on it.

To tell if the candidate has this ability to do something that is good enough for now and to postpone finishing it perfectly, ask: "Tell me about a recent time you did not know everything at the beginning of the project. What did you do?"

5. Adaptable People
In agile projects, as in all types of projects, conditions are not always perfect. We may not have a team room, we may not have acceptance criteria for all the features, and we may not even be able to remove obstacles, but we still have to get work done.

We're not looking for saints; we're looking for people who are adaptable to current conditions. We want people to do the work even with imperfect conditions.

You'll know if you have one of these adaptable people based on the answer you get to the following: "Tell me about a time when you did not have the conditions you would've liked for your project. What did you do?"

6. People Willing to Work Outside Their Expertise
One sign of adaptability is a person's willingness to work outside her area of expertise. I'm not suggesting that people do things that they have no idea how to complete—for example, a developer shouldn't turn into a marketer (unless the developer wants to). I am suggesting that if someone is very comfortable with the database, she also should try to work a little bit in the GUI. If she's comfortable with middleware, maybe she'd like to work a little at the platform level or at the upper level of the application. If she's been an exploratory tester all of her test career, maybe she's willing to try a little scripting. If she's been an automation weenie, maybe it's