The theme at LLEWT this year was Rules and constraints to ensure better quality. My experience report concerned a team I'd been on for several years which developed (bottom-up) a set of working practices that we called team agreements. The agreements survived "natural" variation such as people leaving and joining and even some structural reorganisation which preserved most of the team members but changed the team's responsibilities or merged in a few people from a disbanded team. The agreements did not, however, persist through a significant round of (top-down) redundancies where the team was merged with two others. I'm interested in thinking about the ways in which constraints on how people work affect the work and whether there are patterns that could help us to apply the right kinds of constraints at times they are likely to be useful. I'm going to use this post to dump my thoughts. My starting po...