And yet, in my experience, even people who recognize this focus hard to improving estimates and "accountability", but rarely seriously try to reduce dependencie

And yet, in my experience, even people who recognize this focus hard to improving estimates and "accountability", but rarely seriously try to reduce dependencies. I tend to operate on the opposite principle, to the point that I believe it is worth doing substantial amounts of seemingly redundant or throw-away[1] work to turn hard dependencies into soft dependencies. But you have to have both a business organization and a software architecture that can support this. [1]: Really, "throw-away" just means "temporary", and all our work is temporary—the question is just how temporary.