12 Agile Principles — #12 of 12

Continuous Improvement

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

Agile is adaptive in two respects:

The design is adaptive to uncertain and changing user requirements — it can start with a high-level view of requirements and progressively elaborate requirements after the project is initiated.
The process itself is adaptive rather than highly prescriptive. Agile is based heavily on continuous improvement, using short intervals to reﬂect on what’s working and what’s not working and taking quick corrective action as necessary. In Scrum, this is called a retrospective, and it happens at the end of each sprint.

The team is expected to continuously improve and adapt the agile process as needed as the project progresses.