Comment Re:derails because of laziness and job protection (Score 1) 445
Overall a great slashdot discussion, with interesting comments. As a programmer, who since many years work mainly as product owner in a reasonably large project (~100 devs, and some 100 more in related SAFE trains), I think you mention many of the problems I perceive we have. We've adopted SAFE on top of mainly scrum based ideas in an attempt to get teams to cooperate better. Of course there have been/are deadlines that are hard to meet while trying to balance new features versus addressing various "debts" we have since going live with the first customer.
I wouldn't say we've derailed, it's still bearable.... and the issues are not mainly due to people being lazy or caring about keeping their jobs. In the end most people try to do their best given what they are told to do and what's measurable. It's more a combination of prioritizing (end user) features with a culture of not documenting requirements or design/architecture, and the impact from how of "agile" has been interpreted. At team level there are unit tests and DoDs, but cross team refinement/design, testing, integration, delivery is a challenge.
Of course it would be a challenge with waterfall, RUP, etc too... but by pushing too much onto each "self-organized agile team" the whole setup/development has become inflexible and slow.