12 Agile Principles — #9 of 12

Continuous Attention to Technical Excellence and Good Design

“Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.”

This next statement is an interesting one. Many people might have the image of an agile software project team as a bunch of “cowboys” that just get together and hammer out code without much design planning and without any coding standards. That is not usually the case.

Agile recognizes the need for doing things the right way to avoid unnecessary rework later. However, an agile approach should not result in overdesigning or “gold-plating” a product. A comment you will hear often in an agile environment is the concept of “just barely good enough.” In other words, the work should be done to a sufﬁcient level of completeness and quality to fulﬁll the purpose it was intended to ﬁll, and nothing more. Going beyond that level of “just barely good enough” is considered waste.