What's 'Norm'al for one team is not for another

Teams that move into a Norming phase establish game rules for behavior. They feel mutually accountable for the goals of the sprint because they have set the goals themselves. Game rules help the team keep its focus; norms are rules that the team follows and emerge from the team's history and experiences. You can imagine that a team's members are much more committed to the norms they've set for themselves rather than rules set for them by managers or others. It is imperative that a ScrumMaster is secure enough to create an environment in which team norms may emerge. And it's important to know that one team's norms will be very different than that of another's. One team I worked with had a rule that if a developer chose to pair with another developer on a user story, then the code did not have to go through a code review; the team found over time that pairing resulted in much better code quality as a result, allowing a formal code review bypass...