If You Could Only Do One Practice

If someone asked me if they could only do one agile practice what would it be? Easy, continuous improvement.

Why Continuous Improvement

Why would I pick continuous improvement as the one to do? If you really practice continuous improvement and slowly evolve your development practices then eventually you'll get to a set of practices that work best for your team.

It's the opposite of doing say Scrum by the book and evolving it from there. That's not a terrible way to go either as long as you add in XP development practices, and genuinely apply continuous improvement.

What's a Practice a Team Shouldn't Do Without

What practice can an agile team not afford to do without?

That's a harder question because XP practices, for example, build upon each other. Your team's chance of success improves drastically with each practice you add, so my cheeky answer is all of them.

That's not a very satisfying answer, so if you bent my arm and made me pick one I'd have to go with continuous delivery.

Why Continuous Delivery

Why would I choose CD as the one not to do without? Basically because in order to do CD effectively, you need some form of most of the other XP practices.

There's a reason it's canonically called CI/CD. You can't do CD without CI.

You can't do CI without working off of main. You can't do pull requests and code reviews if everyone is working off of main, so you better pair or mob to get as many eyes as possible on every push.

CD works as a driving force to improve all your development practices.