What is a mature team?

On the italian XP mailing list, Tommaso Torti asked an interesting question to the list few days ago.

When do you define a team ‘mature’?

Translating myself, my reply was something like:

A mature team is a team that implements at its best the theories written on books, that makes concrete what’s on paper in value for the client.
It’s cohesion and communication.
A team that’s mature is a team that hasn’t nothing to do anymore, it’s mature, can still improve?
In my very personal opinion it’s a death team, the mission is achieved, it’s time to change, it’s time to shuffle the cards. Roll in new people, change.

Some other interesting replies to the question:

PierG wrote:

A mature team is a team robust to change, wich means that it’s able to change without crumbling the process.

Francesco, being a strong XPer wrote:

A mature team is a team that doesn’t need a manager, a project leader, an architect or a designer in order to produce results. It’s able in an autonomous way to increase its own productivity.

Luca Minuduel quotes from the website of Joseph Pelrine:

* Flexible and responsive to changing organisational conditions and wider environments.
* Able to work with pressure, uncertainty and disagreement.
* Able to be self-organising and self-regulating.
* Maximise the strengths and creativity of each team member.
* Satisfies both organisational and individual needs

and Marco:

A system in equilibrium naturally tends to resist to change and that’s why we need to apply a force (questions/retrospectives/etc for people, splitting for stories, refactoring for code), because we need to take the system at the edge of chaos to facilitate the emergence of a new, spontaneous configuration.

Definitely a nice conversation, and for you what’s a mature team?