Communication Principles
Agile lives and dies on communication. These laws offer insight into clarity, distortion, alignment, and the hidden cost of miscommunication. By understanding how information moves (or stalls), teams reduce waste, resolve conflict faster, and maintain alignment across roles, time zones, and priorities.
| Concept | Agile Relevance | Usage in Agile |
|---|---|---|
| Grice's Maxims of Communication | Effective communication requires clarity, relevance, brevity, and truthfulness. | Improves team collaboration, backlog refinement, and stakeholder engagement to avoid miscommunication pitfalls. |
| Law of Communication | Communication fidelity decreases as the number of intermediaries increases. | Promotes direct interaction, flatter team structures, and short feedback loops to preserve clarity and speed. |
| Postel's Law | "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." | Encourages flexible API design, modular system architecture, and robust Agile team interactions. |
| Conway's Law | "Organizations design systems that mirror their communication structures." | Supports cross-functional Agile teams, DevOps collaboration, and breaking silos to improve software design. |
| Larman's Laws | Large enterprises resist true Agile transformation, preferring to maintain their existing structures. | Helps Agile leaders navigate enterprise Agile adoption, SAFe/LeSS scaling, and organizational change management. |
| Brandolini's Law (Bullshit Asymmetry Principle) | "The energy required to refute misinformation is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it." | Encourages fact-based Agile coaching, stakeholder management. |