Broken windows in the project

Do you know the broken window theory? It originates from the USA and tries to answer the question why some empty buildings fall into disrepair within a very short time and others do not. The surprising realization: it often starts with a broken window. If this is not repaired immediately, people will soon break more windows, dump garbage in the house and turn it into a ruin in a short time. Opinions differ as to whether the “zero tolerance policy”, which is based on this realization and provides for severe penalties even for petty offenses, is actually a good idea. But for agile development teams, this theory contains an absolutely justifiable call: Stop the beginnings, otherwise morale will go down the drain at breathtaking speed! What are broken windowsin a project? For example

• Open bugs
• Unfinished Stories
• Unrefactored, poorly structured code
• Code fragments commented out
• Unresolved knowledge monopolies
• Missing UserDocumentation
• Fancy Daily Scrums
• Fancy retrospectives
• Demonstrations of unfinished stories in Sprint Review

So let’s not allow “broken windows” in our projects.