re: Tools for Agility - A white paper by Kent Beck

Peter Ritchie — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:21:33 GMT

I think transparency is a cornerstone of Agile. Agile promotes better communication with the customer. Hiding behind a vale of secrecy means you're not communicating with the customer is many ways.

I think transparency allows customers to "talk" to the development team--talking to them about what they want, not telling them what to do because the team is nebulous.

Innovation and experimentation can come out this communication; but I don't think it falls out of simply being agile. Effectiveness and efficiency are improved through Agile; but projects only get more effective and more efficient through transparency because of this increased communicability.

I would say that a team saying they can't detail what they're doing because it would slow them down isn't truly agile--they're not communicating effectively with the customer. Agile isn't simply an excuse to avoid the traditional artifacts that aren't the software deliverables...

re: Tools for Agility - A white paper by Kent Beck

Carl — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:06:52 GMT

Transparency goes beyond the team members' communicating to management and outsiders. It involves telling your fellow developers what you're doing; putting UML diagrams on a Wiki or white board to show what your code is going to look like and how it'll behave and regular, tested commits of code.