Following an agile process alone will not guarantee your teams will be high performers. Teams undergo various challenges while transforming into a highly productive team. This article looks at the areas where teams generally struggle in adopting agile principles and the typical root causes for those struggles, as well as eight behaviors that can help drive teams toward greater success.

Many organizations appear to suffer anxiety at the thought of programming. They want to get everyone but the programmers in a room to discuss a project down to the minute and the dollar, without a full understanding of the coding required. But a few hours of code experimentation generates far more understanding than days of debate by architects and analysts. Don't be scared of programming.

The space shuttles Challenger and Columbia were two of NASA's biggest disasters. Investigations into these accidents discovered the engineering issues responsible, but management practices and cultural barriers also were found to be contributing factors. Does your organization have a healthy culture that lets you safely voice concerns? It could help you prevent tragedy.

The main goal of endgame testing is to test the system end to end from the user's perspective. This should ensure continuity between components developed by different teams, continuity in user experience, and successful integration of new features. Endgame testing will often identify gaps that are difficult to discover inside agile teams, including flows across the product.