Agile as Trauma

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.

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.

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.

I want you to consider instead the possibility that Waterfall came to exist, and continues to exist, for the convenience of managers: those who need you to promise them something specific, and then deliver exactly what you promised them, when you promised you’d deliver it.

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

Conceptual integrity makes the product both easier to develop and easier to use, because this integrity is communicated to both the development team and the user, through the product.

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

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

Fixed time, variable scope.