Recently at The Job, the upper management types have been talking about Agile as a way for us to get to market faster. The problem is that they keep addressing it towards the developers, implying that they will be finishing development faster under Agile.
However, one of the big things about Agile is that developers are often writing more test code, and spending time writing spike solutions, which means that there is more code overall to write.
Sure, the focus in Agile on automated testing removes the later debugging hassles, but those are not the "Concept to Deployment" bugs that are getting pre-emptively squashed, but the field issues. We developers still need to write the fully functional code, and refactor it. Agile limits the amount of code needed per release, but requires more releases to reach the desired feature set of a full product
So we're facing an executive team that thinks Agile will cut development time in some grand way, while we face all the usual headaches of transitioning to Agile, as well as the actual development time.
