I just finshed reading this excellent post by Aaron about the common misconception that employing continuous integration in your build environment actually means you are adopting agile methods. Unfortunately I’ve encountered this kind of reaction from teams that I have worked with in the past.
Continuous integration gives you a measure of control over any particular project. In some of our clients we use it to keep tabs on how the team are going. Too many commits might mean that they are churning code without really testing it out – too few and they might have hit a snag and are at risk of going dark.
The point is a good team leader can use continuous integrataion to take the temperature of the team regardless of whether they are using agile methods or not.
P.S. I loved the “in the end we are closer to a traditional hunt, gather, and analyze shop” line in Aaron’s post.