Why inspect and adapt?
In a recent talk I gave on Scrum I highlighted the power of inspect and adapt cycles. Or as the the Agile Principle puts it:
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
First I talked about a non-agile project that did NOT inspect and adapt. On this project every month (or week, or day) we add some good stuff (valuable features and functionality) and we add some bad stuff (bugs, worthless features, poorly implemented functionality). Conceptually it looks like this:
But when we inspect at the end of every cycle (month, week, day) and adapt based on that inspection then we find what works and double-down on it and find what does not work and eliminate or fix it. Conceptually then it looks like this:
And we would rather release something that looks like the second graph and not the first. That is the power of inspect and adapt.