Agile Principle 9: Technical Excellence

Let's take a look at the ninth underlying principle of the agile manifesto:

"Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility."

What does that really mean? What are the implications for our daily business? Let's analyze this principle and see where this gets us.

• "Continuous attention" - Beware of routine in your daily business! Keep your concentration high, stay focused on the things you're working on. This also implies to take a break when you are not able to do so. Do not force yourself to go on if you're distracted and powerless.
  Values: Focus
  Principles: Opportunity, Accepted Responsibility, Reflection
  Practices: Motivation
• "technical excellence" - Gather the right staff with the right skills to create the product. Cultivate life-long learning to acquire new knowledge and improve your skills.
  Values: Courage, Simplicity, Focus
  Principles: Reflective Improvement, Amplify Learning, Accepted Responsibility, Quality
  Practices: (agile) Testing, Sprint Retrospective, Motivation
• "good design" - Don't create a product which looks nice outside but is a piece of crap inside. Follow a professional honor and build your software product in a way you could be proud of in every detail.
  Values: Simplicity
  Principles: Improvement, Quality, Baby Steps, Incremental
  Practices: Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, Refactoring
• "enhances agility" - If we do not have the right skills and the right attitude, we will get stuck in our agile journey. This is the reason why many teams do not proceed after their initial agile success.
  (An extreme situation of this principle is when people completely refuse the agile values at all. In this case the best way for both these people and the rest of the team is to break up.)
  Values: Openness, Courage
  Principles: Reflective Improvement
  Practices: Sprint Retrospective

To say it in two words, the ninth principle is about Technical Excellence.

Also read in this blog post series:

• Agile Principle 1: Satisfy the Customer
• Agile Principle 2: Embrace Change
• Agile Principle 3: Frequent Delivery
• Agile Principle 4: Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Agile Principle 5: Support and Trust
• Agile Principle 6: Face-to-Face Conversation
• Agile Principle 7: Working Software
• Agile Principle 8: Sustainable Pace
• Agile Principle 9: Technical Excellence
• Agile Principle 10: Keep it Simple
• Agile Principle 11: Self-Organization
• Agile Principle 12: Inspect and Adapt