Things to look for in an agile organization

Here's a list of things to look for in an agile organization. If an organization calling itself agile doesn't have a significant number of them, it's a clue to look carefully at how things are working before becoming involved. Think of it as a Joel Test for agile. Here are the items, in no particular order:

• • continuous integration

  • story wall

  • regular metrics (velocity, coverage, cyclometric complexity...)

  • (promiscuous?) pair programming

  • TDD

  • version control (not specific to agile org, but key nonetheless)

  • "one team" (the idea of distributed agile seems to be in question, having advocates and detractors on either side of the issue)

  • regular demos (with who, the customer?)

  • planning poker

  • coach who removes obstacles that block developers

  • daily standups

  • retrospectives

  • sustainable pace (used to be called "no overtime" or "40 hour work week")

  • reference books to support good code: (Clean Code, Refactoring, ...)

  • collective code ownership

  • pair during interviews

  • Got a Agile Center of Excellence – A one stop shop for Agile

• Learning eco system

• Work flow automation

• Automation tools

• Technical Debt Wall, see here and here

Feel free to add your own. Before removing an item, please post a comment as to why it's not important.