Agile Principle 12 – Team reflects, tunes and adjusts

The last principle of the Agile Manifesto provides for learning and adjustment by the team.

What you see?

This adjustment allows for continuous process improvement.  Teams don’t allow themselves to become stagnant or stale – they change and become better.  The manifesto doesn’t proscribe how often and allows some leeway.  The definition of “at regular intervals” provides sufficient guidance that this reflection on how to become more effective is more than an annual review.

Some questions that can help shape that review are:

• What strengths do we have as a team, opportunities, threats and weaknesses (SWOT analysis)?
• What insights can we gain from the most recent software release?
• What are our customers telling us?
• How can we become better?
• What mistake have we made that we can learn the most from?

Reflection and adjustment can prove powerful for accelerating delivery of great software and developing great teams!

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.

Related articles

• Agile Principle 11 – Self Organizing teams produce best architectures, requirements and design (tapuniversity.com)
• Reflections on the 10 Years Since the Agile Manifesto (allaboutagile.com)
• Agile Principle 6 – Face to Face Interaction (tapuniversity.com)
• Agile Principle 10 – Maximize work NOT done! (tapuniversity.com)
• Agile Software Development Turns 10 (devx.com)
• Agile Manifesto, made more agile (zdnet.com)
• Agile Principle 8 – Constant Pace of Development (tapuniversity.com)