Principles to Practices
Ultimately, what people do, how they behave, is what creates great products. Principles and practices are guides; they help identify and reinforce certain behaviors.
Although principles guide agile teams, specific practices are necessary to actually accomplish work. A process structure and specific practices form a minimal, flexible framework for self-organizing teams. In an agile project there must be both anticipatory and adaptive processes and practices. Release planning uses known information to “anticipate” the future. Refactoring uses information found later in the project to “adapt” code. Ron Jeffries once said, “I have more confidence in my ability to adapt than in my ability to plan.” Agilists do anticipate, but they always try to understand the limits of anticipation and try to err on the side of less of it.