Turn one dev loose, no distractions, and you can get amazing results.<p>Add another dev, and if they are aligned, they can knock it out of the park.<p>Add another dev? Better have a damn good reason.<p>I forgot how productive a single person can be until I joined my recent company. I'm the only dev working on a sizeable application. I have all the resources I need and zero distractions. I can't believe how smooth progress is and I whince at what would happen if we added other team members without having a clear role for each person and a pressing need for them. Stand-ups are devastating to productivity.<p>I just left a number of huge enterprises. I could barely get anything done at any of them. Sizeable teams that could barely push out a web app. Its no wonder they have to acquire companies that were built by three devs to innovate.
Most of my career has been at startups, but I'm at a fairly large enterprise now. Agile is very different here. It's much more rigid. Every team has an agile coach, there are rules that must be followed, there are limits on who can make decisions about certain things, we do every sprint ceremony ever conceived every sprint, all pods must follow the exact same process. There's no flexibility and little acknowledgment of the original Manifesto principles (e.g. people over process). With an implementation like this, I can see why enterprises can fail to gain as much benefit from agile as promised.
SAFe is an atrocity. I bet most of these 'large enterprises' are doing something similar.
Plan your sprints a full 2 years in advance! No changes, gotta stick to the plan, because it's in the sprint! But we do standups!
(I know, I know, no true scotsman, but also, come on....)