The Art of Agile Development

Tune and Adapt

When you see the need for a change, modify your process. Make the change for your team alone; though your team may be one of many, it’s OK to do things differently. Every team’s needs are different.

These changes require tuning. Think of them as experiments; make small, isolated changes that allow you to understand the results. Be specific about your expectations and about the measurements for judging success. These changes are sources of feedback and learning. Use the results of your experiments to make further changes. Iterate until you’re satisfied with the results.

Some experiments will fail, and others may actually make the process worse. Team members need to be flexible and adaptive. Your team needs to have the courage to experiment and occasionally fail.

Changing your process requires you to have a holistic view of what you do and why. New agile teams should be cautious about changing their process, as they don’t yet have the experience necessary to give them that holistic understanding. Once you have the experience, use the feedback from your changes to improve your process and your understanding of agility.

In Practice

Tuning and adapting is implicit in XP; teams are supposed to make changes whenever they have a reason to do so. Many XP teams use retrospectives to give themselves a more explicit venue for considering changes. I’ve made retrospectives an explicit practice in this book as well.

The courage to adapt is an important principle, but it’s not explicit ...