Include All Team Members in Sprint Meetings

I’ve been in a few arguments lately. Each argument was unique but there was a common thread running through each: whether the whole team should be invited to attend certain scrum meetings.

I have a firm belief that teams do best when team members feel and act as one team:

Any feelings of “us vs. them” go away
Finger-pointing and CYA activities are eliminated.
Team members put team goals ahead of personal agendas
Team members become more willing to compromise to gain consensus if doing so helps the team achieve its overall goals
teams should foster a whole-team mindset. For example, an team should not feel as though it has a programming subteam and a testing subteam. When a team acts as one team, the idea of functional subteams fades away. By the same token, teams shouldn’t feel as though they need to hide anything from one another, and that includes the ScrumMaster and the product owner. Teams that act as one team include every role in every sprint meeting: from planning and daily scrums to reviews and retrospectives.

The arguments I found myself in were with people who didn’t value this one-team or whole-team mindset as much as I do. I suspect that’s because they don’t realize how crucial a whole-team mindset is to succeeding with .