Agile teams use working agreements to align their ways of working and improve collaboration. Below, we’ll cover what working agreements are, why an agile team needs it, and what the best practices are. We’ll also share a few example templates to help you get started with building your team’s working agreement.

What is a working agreement?

Working agreements describe how a team wants to work together. In practice, they are guidelines, rules, or behaviors the team has agreed on. Sometimes the document is also referred to as ‘team contract’ or ‘team agreement’.

A team agreement is very important as it sets a time for collaboration and provide shared ownership of the team success. For a team to work effectively and achieve their goal, the team members need to decide on the ways of working and behaviours they want to follow.

What should an agile team include in a working agreement?

A working agreement should include all guidelines, rules, or behaviors the team members are expected to follow. When you’re creating the list, it’s helpful to start it with: “As a team, we agree to…

There is no standard format for a working agreement as it may vary as per the need of your team. However, it is a good practice to group a working agreement into different headings.

For example, many working agreement documents have a section for Version Control Rules. This section could include the following agreements:

• Only merge when all continuous integration (CI) checks pass
• Review pull requests in less than 1 day
• Never commit directly to the main branch

Another section could be a team’s Definition of Done section. This section could include the following:

• Code has been peer-reviewed
• Code is merged to the main branch and successfully deployed 
• All continuous integration (CI) checks pass

Best practices on agile team working agreement

1. Get started with a simple version

Make the work easy for your team and start with the obvious item. A work agreement can always be updated as need arises. Once you have a shared document, it’s easier to add new working agreements. 

2. Create the working agreement together as a team

It is a good habit to create your working agreements together with the team. Don’t fall in the trap of copy-paste an old working agreement document. This often results in some of the team members ignoring the document altogether as they feel like it doesn’t reflect reality. Get every agile team member involved in your working agreements creation. 

3. Document your working agreements in one place

It is a good practice to have your working agreement in a single document that you can point to everyone who needs to understand how your team works. Even though your company may have generic working rule for every staff, it’s important that you have a team-specific document where you bring everything together. Notwithstanding, always ensure you align your team working agreement with the company-level agreements.

4. Keep your working agreements in sync with real life

You must understand that a working agreement is a living document and should constantly be reviewed. One good way to keep your working agreement up to date is to regularly review it during your team retrospective.  Retrospectives offer the opportunity for the team to discuss how they could improve the way they work together.

5. Make it easy to propose changes to the working agreements

Ensure that you provide the opportunity for your working agreements to be easily updated with constraint. It is a good practice to state in the introduction of your working agreement that everyone can propose changes to the working agreement. However, the team must approve any changes before it goes into effect. 

6. Go through the working agreements with new team members

Whenever a new person joins the team, it’s important that you go through the working agreements with them. They should be able to comment and ask questions to understand the working agreements. Going through the list together is a great way to onboard people to the team and, at the same time, ensure they’re committed to the team’s ways of working.

Enforcing working agreements

It makes no sense to spend time creating a working agreement that would not be implemented and does not align to the value and purpose of agile product delivery.

Working agreements should be constantly enforced and reviewed to optimize the value. It is a baseline to help a storming team evolve to a performance team. Agile project/product team working agreements should be designed to answer the question, “what should anyone working in or with the team know?” and therefore, it also includes the background for the project. This format works well for projects/products because their scope is limited.

Working agreements are a great tool for agile software teams who want to improve collaboration and be more productive. When you agree on what you want to do together with the whole team and make sure everyone is able to keep the agreements, your team will work together with less friction and be happier.When the whole team commit to the working agreements it means they are committed to be held accountable for all agreed items.