I missed the earlier discussion, so I may be repeating already
delivered wisdom. I'd say the core of agile practices is
collaboratively learning from feedback, early and often. Inspecting
and adapting, continuously and iteratively. It's the team's action-
reflection cycle that spurs real, accelerated learning...and learning
generally means change, anything from small adaptations to large
transformations.

When teams adapt, they experiment and select the practices that will
serve them best. I'm a fan of iteration, release and project
retrospectives, as a technique for embedding the inspect/adapt cycle.
Because I've watched it work for 20 years.

But I hope it happens at other times during the project too. In daily
meetings when someone says, "this is what I did yesterday and here's
what I plan today." Over coffee. During a pairing session. In a
conversation with the customer.

Collaboratively,
Diana

Diana Larsen
www.futureworksconsulting.com
503-288-3550

Upcoming Events:
- "The Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills" with
Diana Larsen & Esther Derby
Next Session: June 6-8, 2006, Portland OR USA. Email me for more
information

Watch for:
"Tuning Up Teams: Retrospective Toolkit and Recipes" by Esther Derby
& Diana Larsen, available Summer 2006! Published by Pragmatic Bookshelf
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/dlret/index.html




On May 11, 2006, at 5:24 AM, Dan Bunea wrote:

> Very interesting summary. I believe that the very core of agile
> processes
> is represented by the circle of life (Ron Jeffries - Extreme
> Programming
> Installed), where a continuous learning and doing loop is done
> together by
> the customer and programmers, until the value is delivered.
>
> One day I was asked what is the most important thing in agile
> thinking,
> and I couldn't answer very fast, so I thought that the best answer
> would
> be to try to remove some practices and see which would be the ones
> that
> agile cannot live without. I think that you can't be agile, if you
> give up
> iterations and the continuous learning and adapting process where
> feedback
> is essential. Test first and continuous integration would be the
> next, as
> this is the feedback you get from the code itself, telling you if
> something has broken.
>
> I did write about communication and its importance in agile
> methodologies,
> inclusing feedback at:
> http://danbunea.blogspot.com/2005/11/problem-of-communication.html
>
> Dan Bunea
> http://danbunea.blogspot.com
>
> On Thu, 11 May 2006 17:08:06 +0400, Brad Appleton
> <Brad.Appleton@...> wrote:
>
>> Looking for feedback on my similarly titled blog-entry at
>> http://blog.bradapp.net/ ...
>>
>> Feedback, Flow and Friction
>>
>> I think those three words may just possibly distill the essence of
>> Agile, Lean, and Theory of Constraints: Feedback, Flow and Friction!
>>
>> * Feedback is, to a large-extent, what Agile is all about. It is
>> about getting continuous feedback quickly and frequently as
>> possible (at
>> all levels of scale) to promote collaboration and synergy and
>> synthesis
>> of the knowledge we gain thru learning and discovery so we can
>> validate
>> it early and often.
>>
>> * Flow is what "Lean" is all about. It is about ensuring smooth
>> continuous flow of the value stream, from creation thru delivery, and
>> eliminating redundancy and waste wherever possible.
>>
>> * Friction is what "TOC" is all about: identifying and removing the
>> constraints that impose friction on the flow of value and the
>> feedback
>> cycle of discovery and learning.
>>
>> What do you think? How far off the mark is this? How badly am I
>> oversimplifying?
>
>
>
> --
>
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