Split user stories ruthlessly and get value earlier
I love the discussion happening here. I am into projects which &quot;follow agile model&quot; more than last 5 years, however every time I bring up such questions to folks who are die hard fan of these buzz words (mostly non-engineers), I am threatened to be sent to days long Agile&#x2F;SAFe training again and looked down upon blaming I have &quot;Old school waterfall mentality&quot;.<p>I am not saying Agile does not have any value at all. I think it helps middle management (top management only see some high level slides) get some numbers to measure how much work has been done and how much time is remaining to complete the features in the road map (epic progress). On the flip side everyone else forced to make those numbers good (either by working on weekend or taking short-cut with tech debts or in worst case compromise quality). This becomes obvious when managers set rules like  - 90% of the stories must be completed at the end of two weeks sprint (if there are less than 10 stories, you have to close all of them). I see all stories coming to code review , merged, deployed , tested &amp; closed on the last day of the sprint. Even if engineers believe do not believe its going too fast (superficial review, lack of manual testing) scrum master end up make it happen as his job is to make sure &quot;sprint commitments&quot; are met.<p>Now enter the world of SAFe. You plan for 3 to 5 months and can&#x27;t do anything different in this time period (Where is the agility ?). You can&#x27;t prioritize tech debts that you carried when you took shortcuts earlier to deliver MVP as &quot;things are going alright&quot;. Hence, no iteration , only look ahead deliver more features. Spend a week on just planning  and trying to accommodate feature based on &quot;High level estimate&quot; which is usually 50% accurate because you have not broken down to stories yet or has not done any experiments to check if some technology or recipe works or not. In addition to this you have hours of grooming, standups planning, retro , review in each up coming sprint involving the whole team.<p>I think every time you fit a process which may have worked in auto-mobile industry to software industry trying to &quot;get more value &quot; (lean is a new thing) you cease to be an innovative company.