There are many lists of the key attributes of effective Agile Teams produced; the following list distils and collates the common themes of most of them:

• Having Ground Rules

Effective Agile Teams set their own Working Agreement, Ground Rules, whereby the members know and buy-into the Team working practices into which are usually elements to do with all the following attributes.

• Working Together/Collaboration

In a successful agile team, the team members work together on features; UI designers, developers and testers work together to ensure that they, as a team, have finished a story.

All Team members are aware of their own and colleagues’ strengths and weaknesses so he/she knows who to go to for improvement advice for themselves and who else he/she can help to improve.  

As the successful agile team collaborates to finish features, they avoid the problem of having many features started but none getting finished at the end of the Sprint.

• Having Short Feedback Loops

Obtaining feedback at regular, short intervals is a major contributor to the success of an Agile team; they use 1 to 3-week Sprints so they can produce potentially shippable increments of a product to obtain feedback form the WIDER stakeholder community.  During the Sprints, if it is not possible to work with end-users directly, successful teams will seek feedback at every stage of the development of each Product Backlog Item (PBI).

• Being Adaptable

As in all product development, conditions are not always favourable in an Agile environment:

• The Agile team may not have acceptance criteria for every PBI
• A team room may not be present
• The Team may not be able to remove all obstacles. 

However, the Team must GET the work done; Agile team members must be adaptable to any kind of situation (be it the ideal or the worst situation).

Agile team members must be willing to work outside their specialisations.  This does not mean that they are expected to work in areas that they know nothing about; they can help other Team members under their supervision; the simplest form of this is for anybody to run test scripts if they are becoming a bottleneck.

• Intra-Team Communication

Good intra-Team communications is one of the major characteristics of a successful Agile team; Team members:

• challenge each other in a non-aggressive manner
• should not filter their communications ie ‘tell it like it is’
• must be willing to exhibit a sense of vulnerability; a willingness to SAY “I don’t know.” 
• must have the ability to ask for help promptly when they need it
• Being Committed

Successful Agile teams members are fully ‘bought-in’ the Product Vision and Objectives and are fully committed to ACHIEVING the best value for the business within time and cost CONSTRAINTS. 

They try to find ways to share their knowledge, learn various new things and enhance their own skills. 

Also, all Team members must be able to see where Team members’ workloads stand at all times; if someone is overloaded, members must be willing to help the over-burdened person so as to smooth workflow across the team; this would normally happen during the daily Scrum.