The Art of Agile Development

Understand Your Project

To improve your process, you must understand how it affects your project. You need to take advantage of feedback—from the code, from the team, from customers and stakeholders—so you can understand what works well and what doesn’t. Always pay attention to what’s happening around you. Ask “why”: why do we follow this practice? Why is this practice working? Why isn’t this practice working?

Ask team members for their thoughts. There’s an element of truth in every complaint, so encourage open discussion. As a team, reflect on what you’ve learned. When you discover something new, be a mentor; when you have questions, ask a mentor. Help each other understand what you’re doing and why.

In Practice

XP is full of feedback loops—giant conduits of information that you should use to improve your work. Root-cause analysis and retrospectives clearly improve the team’s understanding, and other practices reinforce the principles in more subtle ways.

For example, sitting and working together as a whole team gives team members opportunities to observe and absorb information. This is tactical feedback, and it can reveal strategic issues when something unexpected happens. Stand-up meetings and the informative workspace contribute to an information-rich environment.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the practices of energized work, slack, and pair programming also spread useful information. When team members are under pressure, they have trouble thinking about ways they can improve their ...