Sounds to me like they tried to apply "put out fires" management style to new features.
Sadly, most managers are of the wait until there's a fire type. These are not really managers except in title as they simply are not managing anything.
Sadly, most managers are of the wait until there's a fire type. These are not really managers except in title as they simply are not managing anything.
Fundamentally, the problem was trust -- the management didn't trust the engineers, so they micromanaged them poorly while invoking "agile" to make heavy management somehow seem like a populist movement for the "team". And because the team was micromanaged and not trusted, motivation was low and the output was poor, which just made the problems worse.
(Not surprisingly: the company recently just laid off the entire staff)
The only thing the Unruly team is dogmatic about is delivering valuable software. The techniques they talk about are simply this - techniques.
In my work as a consultant there is rarely a 'one-size fits all' technique to developing a feature, but knowledge of several approaches is very valuable.
This is the purpose of the article - to allow you to consider the addition of 'mobbing' to your existing approaches of single development and pairing