We have seen agile work best when a project team has a collaborative culture. This session aims to help you discuss with your team the culture in which they would like to work. It draws on some basic questions regarding trust and trust-worthy behaviour. We will begin by presenting some basic models of trust (including David Maister’s Trust Equation). Then brainstorm factors that can help and hinder trust. We will also explore tools and techniques that can be used to create or improve trust. Run at XPDay09 (see http://agilecoach.typepad.com/photos/xpdaylondon2009/index.html for outputs).

Agile development requires trust, but will also create trust. Agile is a positive trust spiral. Non-agile development is based on distrust, and will create distrust. Agile development cannot happen until all stakeholders have turned the trust spiral around. In this workshop we will explore techniques to initiate trust in a not yet agile organisation. Using ideas from appreciative inquiry, we identify situations that initiated trust in us. We discuss the prerequisites, properties and results of the techniques used. Then we explore other situations where the techniques also could be applied.