Core Principles for an Agile Team

When you’re building toward an agile culture in your team or organization, what are the core principles that you should have in mind as part of your overall goals and philosophy? While perusing some older InfoQ articles on this topic, I came across this one by Darren Hale from last October:  Building an Agile Team.  I like the four key principles or characteristics his team laid out as important to the organizational culture they wanted to build:

1. A customer perspective;
2. Collaborating effectively;
3. Managing by fact;
4. Focusing on execution.

I think these points could be extrapolated to almost any organization that is trying to transform toward agile project processes.  Darren expands on these points:

A team that embodied these principles would be well positioned for success. Members of a team that embody these core principles exhibit a number of good behaviors. Some of those good behaviors are asking questions of customers, thinking like customers, being willing to ask for help, being willing to help others, making decisions with concrete facts instead of personal opinions, and striving to ship finished code.

Excellent observation.