A healthy agile project has several typical rhythms such as releases, iterations, stand-up meetings, builds kicked off by continuous integration, and the red-green-red test cycle of a developer. These rhythms have healthy ranges (such as a stand up meeting lasting less than 15 minutes) and characteristics (such as that same stand up meeting not containing design discussions). When they fall out of these ranges or do not display the appropriate characteristics, they indicate that something is wrong with the agile process. As a doctor takes a patient's pulse or blood pressure reading to determine if the patient is ill, we take readings of our rhythms to let us know if something is wrong with our agile process. The rhythms, when off, sometimes need to be addressed directly, and in other cases point us towards areas of the process where we need to dig more deeply to find and correct the root cause of the problem.

The full article is available on the Agile Journal's website.