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
• MissingUserDocumentation
• Fancy Daily Scrums
• Fancy retrospectives
• Demonstrations of unfinished stories in Sprint Review

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