Team Rules

Some teams come up with a number of team rules that are posted next to the task-board. The idea is to have a number of rules that everybody in the team are committed to follow. And there is typically one rule at the top:

Anybody can remove a rule they are not committed to at any time, this rule excluded.

I think this is a great exercise to force the team to talk about their expectations on each other. Because rules can be anything from detailed practices to general things. So the discussion is actually more important than the resulting list of rules in some cases.

An observation we made in our team when we recently had a team rule discussion is that the word "rule" implies a punishment when not followed. So in my opinion a better word for this exercise is "team values" because that's what we're discussing. A number of common values that the whole team have the same understanding of. Because if you just list a number of values without discussion the meaning, then different people with interpret them differently. So what kind of values can a team come up with? Well here are a few examples:

• We should always check-in better code.
• Our definition of done is XXX.
• We should eat lunch together each day.
• We should use TDD/BDD.
• We should respect meeting start- and end times

Do you have more examples of values you think a team should consider?