The specifically directed or more general activity of walking round the workplace to see what the position is on the 'shop floor' - to view what people are doing, talk about their work, offer assistance, supervise and so forth.
Although there are specifically built in practices that are meant to promote group coordination through the Team Leader and Tracker (see InformationHub), both workers seek to augment this through doing walkabouts. For the Team Leader, meetings at the noticeboard, the spreadsheets, 'standing-up' problems (see WorkingWithInterruptions), 'flagging-up' (raising a small flag to indicate code integration is taking place) serve to let them know what is going on and help in the coordination of work. For the Tracker, details on the cards and their arrival on the Tracker's desk provides information on the status of work - who is doing what, what needs to be done, is the group on schedule and so forth. However, for both workers this information may be augmented, supplemented, clarified and made meaningful by doing a walkabout to see what is going on with specific individuals or groups on the 'shop floor'. This activity may be specifically directed at finding something out ('what are all those cards doing there...', 'are you nearly finished this...' ) or may be less focused ('just to see what is going on...'). Important details may not be explicit in the process and its artefacts themselves but also finding out what is going on may provide occassions for ad hoc collaboration, sharing knowledge/expertise, supervision or just getting up to date on what everyone is doing.
'Doing a walkabout' as an activity is considered to be a commonplace feature of work in a number of settings. Therefore, as an activity it is not thought to be particular to XP itself, and as it is not something which is meant to be specifically designed into the process (as pair programming for instance) claims of its peculiarity to XP cannot really be made. However, we would like to point again that such an activity is less remarkable in a setting where cooperation and coordination is constantly fostered and achieved. Finding out what is going on, helping out, discussing is all part of the ethos.
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/pointer/patterns/doingAWalkabout/doingAWalkabout.html (legacy site)