Even teams with good skills, appropriate technologies, and posters of the Agile Manifesto on the wall can have trouble. Giving into temptation is often the cause. Guiding values are what keep us on the straight and narrow path in the face of temptation. Teams that have strong internalized values will stick to or invent good Agile practices while teams without them will drift into the ditch.

In this talk, I’ll present what I think of as the most important guiding values:

• courage
• working software
• ease
• being reactive
• fast feedback
• naiveté
• visibility
• joy