One of the most important features in agile software development is continuous improvement. However, after an initial burst of inspiration and productivity, teams may stop improving because they believe there are no issues left to address or the issues are too difficult to solve. People need to switch their mental models to keep addressing processes efficiently.

Although the idea of repeatedly exercising the full development lifecycle on smaller chunks of the requirements is newer to the software industry, it isn’t at all new to many other aspects of life and nature. We have been agile practitioners for quite some time, and the software development industry is just catching up. John Ryskowski addresses a few examples.

Do your managers truly own their decision making or are they only "empowered" to come to you for approval of every idea and dollar spent? If you don't trust your team leaders to make decisions, how can you expect stakeholders to? Setting boundaries and defining expectations are two ways to empower managers and encourage initiative, giving them the opportunity to gain your trust.

Mob programming is a software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer. Collaborating like this can have great benefits for everyone involved. Here, Woody Zuill details some practices his team uses to make this collaboration work for them.