I've been working in a four-person war room for four months now and I have a couple of random thoughts.
First, setting weekly iteration goals is very productive because it keeps the team highly focused. However, there is a potential trap. A team that uses weekly goal setting can get caught in a pattern of doing as much as they can possibly squeeze in, which after a period of time, becomes an unsustainable march. The team becomes haggard and new ideas stop flowing. My current manager encourages research time, but unfortunately, we developers have forgotten to listen to him and incorporate free research time into our weekly goal setting. The solution is to schedule or set aside R&D time in the weekly goals. Projects need the accidental discoveries that result from unstructured, chaotic research.
My second random thought is based on the second law of thermodynamics: developers, left undisturbed, will gravitate to one section of the code and stay there permanently. Also known as stove-piping, code-ownership, and going dark. Resisting this natural law of programming requires a constant counter pressure to break developers out of their comfort zones and into different areas. XP counters this by pairing. Other agile projects that are not pairing need to have an equivalent strategy to deal with this.
10:04:45 PM 
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