An Agile Team's Weekly Schedule

By looking at the example schedule I am assuming we are talking about the day starting at 9:00am. Most of my team begins their day by 8:00am or before, so by 5:30pm many are on their way home.

Yep! As I mentioned in the original article, this is just a sample. If you use it without adjusting it to local conditions, you have already failed. :-)

Another example of the pathetic busywork that managers (project and otherwise) occupy themselves with. Agile and its related schemes represent needless complication of the simple and common sense - through the usual misdirection of jargon, acronyms, and appropriation of some of the terms used in spheres of actual productive work ('feature injection' indeed!) Perhaps it represents an effort to fool yourselves and others that you are doing something that a semi-trained intern could not. My advice: Try producing something tangible, for once. You'll see not only how tough real work is, but how satisfying, when it works out right.

Look at us, we're starting 9:30 and at 10:00 we start open up our eyes. 10:30h is stand-up meeting. I like my "local conditions" ;)

Hi, Andrew. I take it you've had some bad experience that leads you to say that?

There's no denying that bad managers use Agile terms to sound impressive and make trouble for others. I'm pretty sure, though, they were doing that long before the Agile movement arose, and long after something else becomes the hot topic. I try to fight it where I can, but it's a big world.

As to making things, the teams I coach ship software to real people regularly, on average once a week. That seems like real work to us, and it seems like real value to the people who use the software. That's pretty satisfying for all concerned.

i vote for longer sprints. in most cases there will be too much communication overhead, give people more room for uninterrupted work.