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Proper Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.

Agile encourages staying flexible and able to change plans on a whim. In practice that tends to mean that people using agile processes don't plan long term. Piss-poor performance is the result. Breaking tasks down into manageable pieces is hard, and requires good long-term planning for any significant project.

Agile in practice is "weeks of work can save you hours of planning".

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This my experience too - agile seems to exist because clients and middle management refused to determine and plan exactly what the want developed, preferring to "know it when I see it". Agile encourages this attitude.

No one knows what they want until they see it. They may have some vague idea but without seeing at least a minimum viable product or at least a non production ready proof of concept how can they know what they want?

The other side of rapid iteration and emergent design is building a system with change in mind, not over architecting and living by the principle of YAGNI - You Ain't Gonna Need It.

It's the job of the architect who should have both the people skills and the technical skills to give the customer what they want and not what they ask for.

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