Tools for Agility - A white paper by Kent Beck

Ajoy Krishnamoorthy, a product manager on our team, recently worked with Kent Beck to publish a great white paper on tooling for the agile team. The section on transparency really resonated with me especially this passage:

A transparent team can more cheaply and effectively coordinate their efforts towards shared goals. Acting transparently sends a signal to others that they can trust you. Trust, when realized, reduces the friction of development as people focus more on what they are accomplishing together and less on avoiding blame. Just as TDD allows me to trust my code and do more with it, trust on a team allows them to be more innovative and experimental.

I like the notion that transparency makes a team more effective, innovative and experimental.  I’ve certainly run into my share of teams that claim that they can’t tell me what they’re doing because to do so would slow them down.  Of course we still have plenty of work to do in order to make it easier for the tools to support transparency but I’m totally convinced that this is the right direction to go. 

What do you think?