TomHelvey
redbarchetta
One of the problems we had as engineers is that the structure of the organization was such that the business called all the shots, wanted what they wanted and didn't want to listen to us. None of them knew how to Agile worked, but they heard the buzzword and thought it was going to save the world so we MUST implement it. Part of the team was in Oregon, some in California, some in Arizona and some all the way in India. It was a mess. It's hard enough to have so many people scattered around in the first place, but then to add Agile on top of it when the scrum masters were newbies themselves was just a recipe for disaster.
Yeah, you have to have buy in from the C level down to the grunt coders and the team has to be empowered to push back. If it's just piling on as usual, it's not agile. If the grunt coder can't tell the C level guy "If you want that, you can't get this", it's not going to work.
THe buy-in is important...however, mutiny does work. I have been in situations like the one you describe...the team was universal in refusing to 'build ballistically' and we 'had the power', so we delivered an excellent core that had the original structure and features agreed to before embarking on feeture creep (sp intended).
Agreed that it works MUCH better in a scenario of a solid base architecture that is robust, and fortunately for us, this is the situation for SONAR. X3e is sooooo good, however, that I may just ride along for a while before jumping on the bandwagon. I would like to see a little more clarity on timeout for <upgrade> costs as <opt out> duration increases. Right now it looks like I could do PRO (from X3) for $99 a year?? Does that go up to $299 if I wait a year???