I was working on a contract to replace a legacy system for the federal government, and we were doing agile development (or attempting to) and let me tell you th

I was working on a contract to replace a legacy system for the federal government, and we were doing agile development (or attempting to) and let me tell you the interface between agile teams and feds is painful. Agile development is about people over process and government is about process over people (for valid reasons!) We sat through a retro after a sprint with some of the feds and the questions were all about deadlines and dependencies and when such and such would be complete so they started putting everything on the board and made us throw out story points and put dates on everything and we were like, congratulations you just reinvented the Gantt chart. Like I get it, they have different incentives than most product owners do, but yeah if you think you’re going to reinvent government by bringing silicon valley development practices to Washington, you are going to have a bad time.