We have found that three principles of agile project management*--transparency, inspection, and adaptation--are highly effective when applied to team writing and learning:
Transparency
Making ideas, assumptions, and written work visible for ease of review by teammates and instructor.
Inspection
Frequent review of work, team processes, and communication
Adaptation
Welcoming changes to writing, requirements, and processes based on learning that occurs during projects.
Transparency in team writing is both a value and an attribute of work. Participants realize the value of transparency while showing their work, showing their understanding, and sharing their intentions and motives. Transparency, therefore, means making visible the many dimensions of collaborative writing and learning: expectations, goals, results, achievements, mistakes, problems, interpretive work, evaluative work, and obstacles to productivity.
Inspection means comparing what writers think their work is saying and doing to what others think the writing is saying and doing. Inspection takes place during peer review.
Adaptation is rethinking, redirecting, refocusing, and redoing work as needed based on inspection and the conversations that follow from it.
*Our writing framework is based on Scrum, an agile project management framework developed by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber and detailed in The Scrum Guide, and on priniples of design thinking that preceded the emergence of agile methods.