The deadline creates the friction. That is the problem.
This notion that you can make the entire corporate structure flex is entirely hinged on the notion that your customer and point of sale is flexible too when it isn't.
Like commie-speak that is when the rubber hits the road. Agile sounds great like any Utopian dream but the reality is the customer is not going to flex when it comes to something they want and much more so on something they've already paid for. If the company needs that contract to operate they are already beholden to that customer. The friction is now real.
In truth, no development process is perfect. So you want to go into any business endeavor with the fewest variables possible. While that can be hard with software dev I go back to the examples of the 8bit video games we got when we were kids.
Maybe there were fewer variables involved back then. Maybe nothing has changed in regards to the 80 hr work week for the poor guy in software dev. I'm not entirely sure myself. All I know is that Agile reads as a pipe dream to me.
In regards to companies like Spotify I'll say this much. A good team does well regardless of the corporate structure in place. Self motivated, knowledgeable and talented all works regardless of your methods. Remove those qualities and any system will fail. It is important then to look at the true causality of failure.
He said it best himself in that video at 8:29 when he said your chances of being agile are basically zero if you can't eliminate friction.
Well you tell me what friction is when a customer expects you will release a new product every year or two years.
Friction will always exist because of the point of sale expectations and projected revenue. Agile just sounds like more socialist / commie speak than anything else.
And as the poster of this video suggested maybe triple A developers need to be a little less risky with new ideas that balloon into problems. That alone would reduce a lot of friction.
For years the sales pitch has been that agile saves time and money when it really doesn't. What agile does is throw a bunch of new rules and micro managers on top of your development cycle to soak up time and money. Rules that you don't need for one. Micro managers you certainly don't need for two.
Agile works when your staff produces and Agile fails when your staff doesn't produce. The bottom line is Agile doesn't work. Iterative development doesn't work.
People may be under the illusion that it does work because there is more information flowing in to the top of the food chain but it means nothing if it only serves to slow down production.
I don't recall the games from my childhood being like this on launch day. That was waterfall development for you. It was either done on the agreed upon date or it wasn't. None of this carry over to the customer post-purchase.
That one struck me as odd as well. I seriously doubt they understand or appreciate their ignorance in regards to the D2 demographic. Every time they talk about D2 it appears they don't.
And that opinion won't change until a hostile flag is put in the game and runes that break the game are put in as well.
21 minutes in I'm not under the impression they even understand the fan psychology still.
We've been 21 minutes in and not once has he mentioned PvP. Nor has he mentioned the rune system beyond a very brief statement regarding D2 and the 10 years of evolution.
For 21 minutes all I saw was their new floater rambling about the basics of an ARPG that should have been part of the original design theory. For a Diablo iteration though it lacked some very fundamental goals.
In D2:LoD I can don an enigma on my summonmancer and teleport around dropping my minions on people insta gibbing them. Yes, people.
Nothing in D3 is as cool as that. For all their time and energy spent they sure didn't understand their target demographic.
One need only look at the Art direction from 1995 to the release of Warcraft III to see that aesthetically, Blizzard designers had made up their mind on how Warcraft was going to look.
This model update was not about aesthetics. It was about cleaning up the expressions, the gestures and smoothing out the models with more detail and more polygons. Nothing more.
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