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Agile is Not Even Wrong

firstbreakfast.substack.com · 806 words · saved by 1 readers

Software serving the warfighter must be unbelievably responsive to evolving user needs. But when time is limited, how do organizations know which ideas to prioritize? Agile — like Scrum and Kanban and Waterfall before it — tries to answer this question but falls short. Agile Solves the Wrong Problem The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently encouraged the Department of Defense to “follow Agile development principles, which deliver working software in less than a year and add capability after that based on user feedback.” Even the time frame - less than a year - tells us Agile is the wrong thing to meet the needs of the warfighter. Agile is a system modeled for organizations with one customer whose requests are centrally prioritized. Agile is not modeled for daily responsiveness to 58 Brigade Combat Teams (BCT) in the Army or 13 Air Operations Centers in the Air Force. When the user base is this diverse and distributed, we’ve merely shifted the bottleneck from Waterfall’s ce

Software serving the warfighter must be unbelievably responsive to evolving user needs. But when time is limited, how do organizations know which ideas to prioritize? Agile — like Scrum and Kanban and Waterfall before it — tries to answer this question but falls short. Agile Solves the Wrong Problem The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently encouraged the Department of Defense to “follow Agile development principles, which deliver working software in less than a year and add capability after that based on user feedback.” Even the time frame - less than a year - tells us Agile is…

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