And before you try to list off work you think fits this category, I urge you to think about how that work could affect a customer's experience.
Because it's invisible, what's the point of arbitrarily shipping it in one-to-two day chunks to "gather user feedback"? Be willing to take the time to do hard things right. I'm not proposing you spin your wheels for ages on something, and I'm generally in favor of shipping early and often, it's just trying to fit every different shaped problem into the same process that doesn't work for me.
And I get that this idea may not work for you, but it works for a lot of very successful people, the luminaries of our field. You're arguing against Ward Cunningham, Robert C. Martin, James Shore, Martin Fowler, Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Bill Wake, Andrew Hunt, Dave Thomas, et. al.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. [0]
Who should I listen to; you, or them?
Solve the problem at hand in the way that suits that particular problem best. Don't be a slave to a rigid process. Don't burn out your developers with a dysfunctional system.
Not every problem is well suited to being broken up into single day chunks of work. Not every developer can maintain a healthy relationship to their work with that level of micromanagement. There is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence about this if you read any thread about developer burnout, or modern day scrum and agile. You mention the Agile Manifesto, but seem to forget that one of the primary points is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
Delivering software to your customer is an interaction. You need more of those, not less of those.
"Stories are "just right" when the whole team can finish four to ten per week, or about six on average." [0]
"For stories that are too big, work with your customers to split them into smaller stories." [0]
If you think it's just "Everything gets shipped every day or two and no other changes get made to how the team functions." then I have not been clear. It's a massive mindset shift, and it comes with a number of other important changes, all of which are best read from the experts themselves, rather than interpreted through me in an HN comment.
Suffice it to say, it's all been accounted for. Agile works.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Agile-Development-Pragmatic-Softw...
> Not every problem is well suited to being broken up into single day chunks of work. Not every developer can maintain a healthy relationship to their work with that level of micromanagement. There is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence about this if you read any thread about developer burnout, or modern day scrum and agile. You mention the Agile Manifesto, but seem to forget that one of the primary points is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
I don't plan to continue the conversation at this point, because it's not productive.
And if you are doing "Agile" but it's not working... then you're Doing It Wrong(tm). Right?
There are lots of reasons agile won't work for you, but they're also great indications you should probably leave a given org.
"Agile" software development doesn't work when there's 5 non-technical stakeholders and 1 software developer.
I took a week to refactor some nasty crap a few months ago. No customer noticed it.
I was rather happy to lower the estimated time for a bunch of other tasks from weeks to days/hours after doing it.
Now you can argue that was not "absolutely crucial", but then we'll just disagree on what that means.
> I urge you to think about how that work could affect a customer's experience
Why is this the be-all and end-all?
This also ignores the fact that there is a huge amount of important work that is effectively invisible to the end user, but is absolutely crucial. The workflow you're suggesting disincentives the team from working on those things, and may even punish them for it (as they are not shipping customer visible features).