Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

The Conversation

The most critical aspect to succeeding as a whole team is effective communication. Communication is best achieved by interacting, or rather, by having conversations. Agile’s primary mechanisms for this necessary communication include release planning, the daily standup, iteration planning, customer demonstrations, and reflections. There are additional ways that encourage increased communication, such as making it a team rule to help each other remove blocking issues, adopting pair programming, and team creation of user stories. Whatever the mechanism, the goal is the conversation—live interaction. Conversation enables interaction while ideas are fresh. It also enables collective thinking, that is, one person’s input inspires ...