What are the Extreme Programming (XP) Values?
The practice of XP is supported by 5 underlying values. This health check gets your team to indicate their current level of happiness across these values, along with any other key values that your teams aspired to.
Communication
The importance of knowledge transfers between team members through appropriate and frequent communication mechanisms.
Simplicity
Avoiding waste and to only do what is absolutely necessary to keep the system as simple as possible to create and support. It focuses on the requirements you know about, rather than trying to predict the future.
Feedback
Getting and acting on feedback on designs and builds so that areas of improvements can be identified and adjustments made.
Courage
The courage to raise issues that are impactive effectiveness, to stop doing things that are not working and the courage to accept and act of feedback, even if it is difficult to accept.
Respect
Team members respect each other especially since they are working so closely together in an interconnected way.
How do these values apply to Extreme Programming?
Extreme Programming (XP) is the most specific agile framework for engineering practices that aims to produce higher quality software and quality of life for the development team.
It is most common for dynamically changing software, with small co-located teams supported with automated testing, and where there are risks caused by fixed time projects using new technology.
Teams sit together in a well set up workspace that lets people have focussed and energised work and paired programming (where 2 people sit at the same machine to allow for continuous code review and more rapid problem solving).
Customers, trackers, developers and coaches all work an in interconnected way to deploy and test stories on a weekly and quarterly basis. The 10-min build, continuous integration, incremental design and test-first programming practices also come into play.
Given this, team values remain crucial for this type of close knit practice. Take a weekly feedback session for example. Designs should be simple and effectively communicated. There needs to be good communication between the team and the users so that feedback is provided in a respectful way. The team then needs the courage to receive an implement those changes. The embedding of these values apply just as much to daily work practices as they do the quarterly cycle reviews.
Understanding the XP Values Health Check
Each of the following principles represent health dimensions that each team member can respond to. They reflect on the way that they actually work on a day to day basis and then indicate whether or not they are happy, neutral or sad with each. If you prefer, you can use a number scale instead. You can also add or remove values that make sense to your teams.
This gives you and the team insight into how the team members are feeling about their work and discuss ways that they can improve their practices to better implement extreme programming.
Communication
We communicate well in a way that achieves our goals.
Simplicity
We aim for simplicity and avoid waste.
Feedback
We ask for, receive and give feedback to improve our practice.
Courage
We are willing to do the right thing and work on tough problems.
Respect
We respect and encourage one another.
Make it your own
Add or remove values that make sense for your team.
How to create a Health Check in TeamRetro
Your template is ready to go
Under Health Checks, select the health check you’d like to complete. Decide if you want to survey the team anonymously, using aliases or openly.
Reveal and discuss the results
Your health check data is displayed showing the average response and tally of each response. Sort dimensions by most positive, negative or mixed responses to make discussions more meaningful.
Keep conversation on track with Presentation Mode
Switch to presentation mode to sync devices making it easier to facilitate and focus conversations. Capture comments and actions along the way.
Review your action plan
Assign action owners and set due dates for new items and review prior actions. This action list can be tracked, shared or integrated into your other workflow tools.
Share the results
Great work, you are all done! Share the results with your team via email, download and print or publish to tools like Jira, Asana and Trello. Results can be tracked in your dashboard.