Presumably, you want to give Agile a shot and are tossing around which principles to implement first. The number one thing I recommend going all out on from the beginning is having an on-site customer. And I don’t mean a customer advocate, or a business analyst, or some manager playing the role of a customer. I mean an actual – physical – real-life – money’s-on-the-line – stakeholder – customer. This single change to your process will completely revamp the way the team communicates. And ultimately, when the rubber meets the road, a development process is all about communication. Traditional heavyweight processes focus on capturing team communication in artifacts so people can refer back to what was said at a later date. This is flawed because it just adds more middle-men to the equation. And just like everything else in life, the fewer the middle-men the cheaper the product. The real emphasis should be on actual team communication, rather than captured team communication.