Interviewing Techniques for Staffing Lean-Agile Teams

Interviewing Techniques for Staffing Lean-Agile Teams

It’s gotta be about both People and Process. I must have heard this dozens of times from people who stopped by our booth at Agile 2006. Lean and Agile involve so much more than simply coding. People issues and management issues are at least as important. That is what the folks who stopped by our booth wanted to talk about. These leaders were looking to learn what is involved in doing this stuff in the real world.

For example, one area of interest involved how to staff agile teams well. Team dynamics can dramatically affect team performance, so staffing teams well is a critical success factor.

During one of the breaks at Agile 2006, I had the chance to sit down and talk with Rob Myers, one of the Senior Consultants in Net Objectives, whose specialties include XP and Test-Driven Development. He comes with a lot of experience leading teams, so he had to do a fair amount of interviewing potential team members.

He has some good insights into an approach that worked for him and can for you, too.

The success of Agile depends very much on the team coming together to work collaboratively. Team members have to be able to think as a team, not as individuals. Thinking and communication skills are at least as important as technical ability. And you want to assess how they learn.

To be fair to potential team members, you want to give them an idea of what will be involved and with whom they will be working. Not everyone can make it in an Agile environment or might be uncomfortable working intensely with other people. Or they just might not click with your particular team.

To be fair to the team, you want to select people who are compatible with the rest of the team, because the team is ultimately responsible for its success.

Rob's approach involves paired programming (regardless whether the team will use paired programming). It provides a good simulated environment within which to assess the candidate's confidence in onesself, technical competence, and communication skills.

Another approach Rob mentions is called “Extreme Interviewing” which is like his paired programming approach taken to a massive level. In addition to the chance to interview lots of people all at once, Extgreme Interviewing also gives interviewees a taste of the “bull pen” phenomenon – working in a noisy room – that usually takes place in Scrum Teams. This is detailed in a white paper called Extreme Interviewing from Menlo Institute.

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