At my company I observed that

- Agile helped the develpment team's motivation as they worked in smaller
timeblocks, did less each timeblock, and had something to show at the end of
each timeblock.  Further, they did implement the idea of "paired
programming" which counter to their ideas before doing it, was actually more
fun and helped people bounce ideas of each other.  I think the
reorganization and focus (morning meetings) helps the dev teams cohesion.

- Agile did nothing to help design and make a product closer to the user's
needs.  The teams often drove themselves around preexisting designs we had,
and weren't too concerned about making each "sprint" verified/tested by a
user.   Basically, the Agile sentiment to "discover the product to build
along the way as you build and iterate it" pretty much did not pan out (no
matter if you think this infeasible, practically it was not viable to have
that much customer interaction).  Nobody called users or even had major
concerns about deeply understanding them, and nobody suddenly had epiphanies
with the little user feedback we did get.  In fact, a little so-so
feedback can actually be demotivating because as you know users can't
envision the final thing, and may be indifferent to something that is very
close to a major innovation but needs some quirks ironed out.

Design was just as essential, and needed to be more responsive to the way
development chunked and tackled work.

Navid

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 4:50 PM, Jessica Petersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:

> What are your experiences in an agile environment? What has worked for
> you and what hasn't?
>
>
>
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