I was talking to a friend the other day about agile philosophy and practices. We were talking about priniciples leading to actions, which in turn, lead to other principles.

He related an opinion he had received regarding the most important agile principle:

A commitment to continual improvement

Or taken from the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto:

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

I believe that if we are serious about producing software that meets our customers’ needs, all other practices and ideas can be traced back to this. If you can’t trace a practice back to continual improvement, or if a practice/principle leads to an improvement, but cannot be extended, then you aren’t going to see real, lasting, long-term improvement.

Too often, when we tackle a larger-scale problem–say something that is at a multi-team level–we don’t keep the idea of continual improvement in mind. Decisions are made that don’t take into account that we want to be able to improve even more sometime in the future. This leads to periods of improvement, followed by a plateau, followed by some backtracking, and then a new improvement.

If we want to reduce this plateau/backtracking, we must keep in mind that we want our decisions to be in accordance with our need to constantly improve.