In two years of leading agile projects at Avanade, an organization heavy in recent college hires, I?ve learned a number of lessons about how to be successful with junior developers on an agile team. Indeed, my most successful team has been my most junior.

I discovered that my biggest mistakes with junior teams were related to partially adopting XP. Where a senior team, by virtue of its experience, can adapt to replace missing XP practices, a junior team reveals the extent to which the XP practices form a whole and are best adopted together.