Agile as Trauma

Features don’t work, in the sense that they can be easily gamed. Behaviour has an advantage over features in that you can describe any feature in terms of behaviour, but you can’t describe behaviour in terms of features.

Basic structures cannot be composed into larger structures unless they themselves are internally consistent, and so the creation of software, just like any artifact of language, is naturally incremental.Software is a very verbose, very precise incantation of how an information system ought to behave.

Your team dynamic is something you can always affect, even if you have no meaningful influence over the major strategic decisions of an organization.

A development paradigm that can be construed from the outside as setting great store by speed—or, I suppose, velocity—is invariably going to be under continuous political and economic pressure to accelerate.

Fixed time, variable scope.

Cross-functional teams: people can work on different parts of a system in parallel.

There are idiosyncrasies of software development that are invariant even as technique and technology improves, and so you are bound to recapitulate these patterns eventually.

In particular, not all software is a Web app ... We discount the volume of, for instance, embedded systems and one-off infrastructure.

Users constitute an essential source of information, up to and including their interactions with prototypes and as paying customers.

Features work as a management control because they manifest in the final product, and their relationship to programmer-hours is about as close to linear as you’re going to get.