As a junior problem 1: PM required features done PM told BA's BA's spoke to SME's to get requirements BA's analysed requirements BA's spoke to architects Architects did their thing Requirements + architecture were pushed to dev team

Outcome: Missed deadlines, wrong functionality delivered, many bugs, unhappy customers.

Later in life: BA was part of the team But architecture was external Discoveries did not change design or approach Better than before, but more missed deadlines, overtime, again unhappy customers, bugs

Awesome? Nope.

Later in life: Agile won, but as a knee-jerk reaction to big-up-front planning it seems as if the world rejected entirely the notion of up front design. We lost conceptual integrity entirely. Decisions were only locally optimized, and the network effect of communication across departments exploded. Dependencies from other departments started becoming show-stoppers. No visibility -> chaos

Yes, you guessed it, better than before, but still problematic: + Feedback now exists and is considered - No real communication across departments - No visibility of what other teams are doing - Localized decisions need to be repeated in other teams - Loss of conceptual integrity: different parts implement different patterns, or behave slightly different. It feels like a disjointed bundle of pieces