Inspect and Adapt

Structure: A transparent project will support inspection and adaptation. A team must be able to inspect and adapt the process. At the conclusion of each iteration, a potentially releasable increment must be delivered by the team to the Product Owner (PO). This increment will then be reviewed, the development process considered in retrospect and improved, and future work planned. The team will publish metrics that allow improvements to be quantified as well as qualified.

Intent: Teams delivering value should be able to critique and improve their own working practices

Proverbs:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
Work smarter, not harder
Practice makes perfect
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

Also Known As:

Change Opportunity

Motivation: Continual improvement and response to change lie at the heart of Agile ways of working. There must be numerous opportunities for this to happen, and they must occur on a predictable and regular basis.

Applicability: Inspection and adaptation must occur as closely as possible to where the work is done. A team will inspect and adapt its products and processes at regular points so that the quality of delivery can be improved.

Consequences: Inspection and adaptation facilitates continuous process improvement. Teams that regularly inspect and adapt their processes demonstrate greater responsibility for their deliverables. Delegation of responsibility is thus encouraged, and improvements can be leveraged.

Implementation: Scrum provides four discrete events at which inspection and adaptation may occur. These are the Sprint Review, which looks at what work has been done and remains to be done; the Sprint Retrospective, which considers how work is being done; Sprint Planning, which determines the Sprint Goal; and the Daily Scrum or Standup, which supports the inspection and adaptation of the team’s daily plan for meeting the Sprint Goal. Extreme Programming does not adopt a comparable discrete approach but rather encourages inspection and adaptation to occur at any point on a development continuum. Feedback and the courage to adapt are core values within XP.