The 5 Stages of a Software Teams Life Cycle

Most of us have been in teams at varying stages of the teams life cycle. Some of us are there right at the inception of a team, and some of us are unfortunately there at the winding down of a team.

From my observations over 15 years in Software Engineering is some teams never go. They are just reinvented with fresh faces. I have experienced some teams almost being brought back to life in waves. These waves of life for some teams have always fascinated me. Over time, most of the engineers in a team might leave, and in the team will be new engineers forming a new wave of life for the team. This can happen over and over again. In turn more legacy is built and knowledge of past architectural decisions can be lost. Have you been in a place where you heard things like: ‘Ah, the previous team did that’?

In 1977, a researcher named Tuckman and a student named Mary Ann Jensen built upon the 4 stages defined by Tuckman originally in 1965, creating what we know now as the 5 stages of team development.

Forming

As in the title, the team has been formed here. This is the first stage.

The team is coming together. It has it’s team members, it’s supposed direction. The team was put together for a reason so we are understanding that here.

In my experience, this part can bring out imposter syndrome and a high level of uncertainty amongst individuals as you navigate your new team and ask questions like: ‘What will my role in this team be?’, ‘I wonder what the team is like’, ‘I hope I like the work’ and ‘What’s my manager like?’.

People are getting to know each other, the team is understanding it’s place in the organisation.

Storming

The storming stage is the second stage of team development. It can often be seen as the most turbulent part of a teams history.

You will experience a number of hurdles before this stage is over. As a team you will disagree on goals, you will question each other on outcomes, the processes you work to will feel unmanaged and short of what you need.

You won’t have a good idea of what good looks like for your product and you will be discovering your users. Team performance will be lower here, expectedly, don’t give yourself a hard time over this. You should be in this for the long haul.

The good news is that each pain point you overcome is progress towards moving to stage 3. This stage will require work from all of you. You will need to be vulnerable, honest and it will require you to address the real issues head on.

Norming

Firstly, congrats you got through the storming stage. You and your team deserve a round of applause for that one.

Beware of the dragons here. You can easily slide back into storming if the lessons learned are not concreted into your teams culture.

At this stage a lot is resolved. Leaders have emerged, positions seemingly understood, team direction and goals agreed.

However, conflict will still emerge here as new things come up, people leave and people join. If you haven’t embedded how to deal with those into your team culture you are at significant risk of falling back into the storming stage.

Performing

At stage 4, performing it can be easy to feel like you have made it. As with the other stages, you can go backwards from here so be careful.

You are a well developed team. You are a cohesive team. You have processes in place and have built a culture to weather most storms.

As a team here you encourage each other to fail and you learn from it. As a team here you are quick to pivot against agreed success metrics to move the needle.

Your structure is clear. You are on the path to growth. Sure, things can still crop up, but you deal with them together, constructively.

Adjourning

Less people see this stage as a result of seeing through all the previous steps.

The main goals and vision to why the team was created way back in stage 1 has been accomplished. Your backlog might not be as strong as it once was, the business value might have been mainly delivered and arguably you could be in more a maintenance mode here.

As a result, most of you will move to other teams or pastures new. If the team has ongoing maintenance stuff to do there might be a barebones team left.

This can feel sad. It always does, to me at least. You should go on and use the experience gained through the stages with this team to help another team move to the next stage.