Agile is all about going slow. It’s about working in small increments reassessing your work on a weekly, if not daily basis. 1
Agile is done by programming in pairs, which slows the coding process down because everything is verbalized. 2
Pair programming transforms what traditionally was an internal monologue into an external dialog. 3
The essence of agile is not building up technical debt. An important part of it is taking the time to refactor as you go. 4
Refactoring code is slow and time consuming. 5
Every time an agilist has a user or product owner review their recent work, chances are that the work will have to be re-done. 6
Backtracking and reworking along the way is an essential characteristic of being agile. Agile, after all, means being quick to change. 7
Agilists track velocity for a single reason: to make sure they don’t try to work too fast. 8
Agile is about slicing the salami really thin, & eating one translucent slice at a time, before slicing another, making sure it’s correct. 9
If anyone imagines that agile has anything to do with moving fast, they’re, well, they’re an idiot. That’s just wrong. 10
Traditional, unreflective coding methods frequently write code that never ships, no one wants, and never gets used. Wasted code. 11
Without a doubt, wasted code is the single biggest drain of corporate resources. 12
Now, I’m talking about production code here, not experimental spikes or learning adventures. Very different kinds of code. 13
But wasted code that was thoroughly written, well-tested, and refactored enough to ship, is just a colossal waste of precious resources. 14
Not only is it wasteful in itself, but it’s expensive in opportunity cost. 15
Opportunity cost is the price of what you did NOT do while you were busy doing the wrong thing. 16
One of the remarkable side effects of agile done right, is that lots of unnecessary features are identified early in the process. 17
Agile is a pretty good tool for discovering what exploratory code should NOT be turned into production code. 18
Jet fighter pilots have a saying: Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. 19
That is, trying to go fast will just slow you down, but trying to go smoothly will speed you up. 20
Of course, you have to slow down to get smooth. 21
That’s pretty much what agile is all about: Going slow to go smooth to go fast. 22
What I’m trying to say here is that the tactical sloth of agile yields significant advantages in strategic speed. 23
In other words, if you slow down enough to be truly agile, you will get things done faster. Yes, agile is faster. 24
Of course, if you TRY to go faster with agile, you’re an idiot, & you’ll go much slower & have a crappy product & piss everybody off. 25/
