One can claim that Agile development has positive attitudes towards continuously improving work practices of IT professionals and the quality of the software. There is a clear focus on learning and teamwork, as well as communication in Agile.

A few years back we did a study on Agile with a focus to understand continuous improvement and how it works in practice.

This study focused on value adding activities such as user involvement and gathering metrics. We also looked at non-value adding activities, such as correcting defects.

Interviews were conducted with 10 IT professionals working with agile development in Iceland.

Results show that IT professionals emphasise communication with users both through direct contact and using email. Results also show that they rarely use metrics to make improvements measurable. One can wonder why this is the case in the ara of New Public Management when everyting needs to be measured to be visible?

You find more about this in our paper:

Lárusdóttir M.K., Cajander Å., Simader M. (2014) Continuous Improvement in Agile Development Practice. In: Sauer S., Bogdan C., Forbrig P., Bernhaupt R., Winckler M. (eds) Human-Centered Software Engineering. HCSE 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8742. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg