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Comment by froh | Hacker News Reader

Fun thing is: agile are principles.

Scrum is a method, or safe or less, or kanban.

And: The complete V belongs to the "definition of done" for safety projects, like the example above, control software for a nuclear reactor.

Whiche gets me to an intuition that you can have dysfunctional teams in any software engineering approach.

The challenge of dysfunctional teams is not addressed by a discussion about agile, lean, "waterfall".

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You are absolutely correct. Defining agile as principles, or scrum as a method is correct, but doesn't change how the terms are used. Turning dysfunctional teams around is something I'm reasearching (as identifying them is easy).

I've been thinking recently about tradeoffs between (agility / resilience / adaptability) and (efficiency). It seems to me that so many orgs' attempts to adopt "Agile" practices are motivated by a desire for increased efficiency per se. Which seems paradoxical. I'm not trying to get into a "one true Scotsman" debate about what Agile really means, but what I keep seeing is an overemphasis on process that runs counter to the heart of the manifesto. IMHO that's the crux of a lot of dysfunction. V. interested in others' thoughts here.

In my opinion [0] Agile improves time to market (latency) at the cost of process efficiency (throughput). If you adopt Scrum to improve efficiency (maybe calling it velocity), then you are using the wrong approach. It will certainly not improve efficiency. Worse, by pushing Scrum to improve efficiency, Scrum loses all its advantages. This leads to the common result nothing changes.

[0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/cost_of_agile.html

Why value efficiency and not quality? Remeber Deming (1)?

             Result of work effort
  quality = -----------------------
                  Total cost

When focus is on quality, quality rises and costs fall. When focus is cost, costs rise and quality falls.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Psychological safety seems to be a big part of the puzzle. For example:

> If there's one thing I feel that is absent from the Agile Manifesto, it's psychological safety. We have learned in the past 20 years how important this to a teams success. https://old.reddit.com/r/agile/comments/jd29lf/the_elephant_...

Just today, I started reading The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. The first two chapters are great and it addresses exactly this question.

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