1, 4, and 5... completely agree. I recently made a point about retrospective accountability.

2 - agree except for the every day part. I say throughout the sprint. If your sprint is a week long, then every day is valid. If your sprint is once a month (and you are maturing towards shorter sprints) then I say every week.

3 - Desire, but not required. Not everyone can do automated tests in their architecture.

I'm pushing back because you say "violations". This implies that not doing these things means you are not agile. I agree they are important, but I can't agree on the "not agile" part. We have to be careful about how strong we are in our evangelism.
 

Hi Kevin--

Good point about evangelism. The subtitle should be substituted for the title. They're not "requirements" by any means, just things that will either kill or severely hamper your agile efforts.

"Every day or two" = 25% of an iteration or less, as a rule of thumb, so sure, one week would be ok except that I try to avoid month-long iterations at all cost.

I think I'd find a way to change my architecture to support automated tests. Ultimately it will cost far more to not have them.
 

I was tempted to parenthesize "Automated." I have seen success where non-automated ATs were the focal point, but it requires a huge amount of discipline to write up acceptance criteria in an unambiguous manner.

For a while I was talking about "acceptance criteria." Then I started seeing the written form that this meant--very nebulous, very open to misinterpretation, and almost never the level of detail required to fully flesh out the story.