alt Hacker NewsCapital-A Agile is for companies that want the benefits of agile (higher velocity) but don’t want to trust their employees or make any meaningful changes in how the management team operates (micromanagement, committing to rigid feature scopes on rigid schedules).
Obviously this doesn’t increase work but companies get to say they are “agile” and the management team gets to keep doing all the counterproductive management they were doing before. No hard conversations about changing how management operates or unpredictable things like giving engineers autonomy.
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Agile is not there for higher velocity! It is sold to management that way often, but intrinsically - no.
Agile though is meant to reduce waste. In other words, you don't march faster, but are supposed to spend more time marching in the right direction. (I personally loathe agile and find it intrinsically broken.. I just find it kind of funny that a process oriented around dynamic environments is supposed to give predictability and speed, when it gives neither. If anything, a lack of predictability since direction can change)
This sounds cynical on its face but it is my experience as well. Management does not actually trust engineers to provide value without close oversight (sometimes with good reason!), so any framework that purports to give engineers more autonomy will eventually be subverted by the management. And since management always has more power than line engineering, they always win.
The only way for "true" agile to really take root would be for management to trust engineering to add more value on their own than when being micromanaged. That's a tall order, and gets much taller in larger organizations.