Working agreements

Working agreements help teams continuously improve with clear goals and consistent execution

Work better together

We believe in self-organizing teams that own their ways of working. With Swarmia’s Pull Request Dashboard, Work Log, and Insights, you already get full visibility into your process and can identify potential improvements — but transparency alone is not enough to become better and stronger as a team.

You’re probably used to sitting down (or standing up!) together as a team and deciding to change something about how you’re working. Maybe this is something you do as a matter of process, for example, in a retrospective meeting every couple of weeks. Having retrospectives and systematically improving ways of working is something that all teams should do, but without considerable self-discipline and support from the organization, decisions to improve can end up being ignored or forgotten.

Swarmia's working agreements help you spring from idea to action, execute consistently, and form new habits as a team.

A multi-functional tool for continuous improvement

Some issues you can identify with Swarmia are clear-cut, while others have considerable nuance and complexity. For instance, code reviews are probably not slow because developers are lazy but because of deeper issues with focus or infrastructure. In cases like these, exceptions highlighted by working agreements are opportunities to dive deeper into the root causes and have meaningful conversations as a team. You can read more about why and how to review code faster here.

On the other hand, managing work in progress is widely recognized as the most critical driver of focused teams that deliver fast. Simply limiting the number of Stories, Tasks, or Epics the team can have on its plate at a given time is all but guaranteed to result in faster cycle times and better team dynamics.

Get started with working agreements

Ready to jump in? Why not have a conversation with your team about issues you’ve detected about team focus or Pull Request cycle times, and head over to the working agreements to get started!

Explore working agreements and decide what to improve

After choosing what to improve and setting up the working agreement, you get insights about how you’re doing as well as a list of all exceptions from the past two weeks helping you pinpoint specific issues or discussions to have with the team.

Set up working agreements and see how you’re doing

Finally, the daily digest keeps you up to date about progress and exceptions and helps your team stick to new habits. If you haven't enabled the daily digest yet, now is a good time to do it for Slack or Microsoft Teams!

Daily feedback helps stick to new habits