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This report outlines technical lessons learnt by about 20 of Australia's most experienced Agile specialists over several years across several projects within an organisation which aggressively applied the Agile practices with much success. In these projects the Agile dials were cranked to 11 to achieve very high levels of quality. Most of the specialists involved believe that they produced the highest quality software of their careers with some of the highest productivity they have ever experienced.

For implementing new systems in any domain, even the Banking/Finance sector, an Agile approach to the testing makes a lot of sense. No matter what Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) is followed, testing continues to be about analysis and reporting on the Quality of the System Under Test (SUT). In Agile development approaches this lends itself to a risk-based approach from the business perspective, contrasting with more traditional development approaches. This risk analysis is done with the Business Users, by the Business Users. This seems to be ideally suited to risk adverse, yet economically constrained domains, such as Banking/Finance.

In this article we look at Flock Theory by D.Rosen for answers to creating highly optimized, self organised Scrum teams. Once we have learned the technicalities of Scrum - the roles, the artifacts and the meetings - we then begin over time to gain an understanding that strong team work and communication is key to a good Scrum team. But how do we achieve that? How do we build a Scrum team and how do we provide for their needs? How do we manage the challenges of the social complexities involved in teamwork?