"x10 developers" are, in fact, proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain. Well, I'd say this is only true for your typical corporate entity, where their products are basically just web applications that represent a state machine using some sort of database store for persistence (which is... basically everything). By the time the company has achieved some size, there's enough proce…
Agile is the current day water fall model. I mean in spirit on in factual procedures. >>I could have easily been 10x more productive if I didn't have to endure four hour sprint planning meetings I completely understand this feeling. The problem is so plain and simple. There are teams that win because of heroics, they achieve something big. Those management types who lack the chops to be heroes simply try to turn hero…
It's a bit of a tangent but I've also observed this. So much that I've started calling it the "cucumber-complex".
Once infected the team not only writes excessive unit-tests to validate things like that a method-call to 'foo' does indeed call the method 'foo'. But they also wrap these unit-tests in quite elaborate parsers in order to "express" them in pseudo-english.
The hilarious (cucumber-specific) aspect is how they usually start by writing their tests in plain RSpec or Test::Unit and then go at implementing the parser to make it "tell a story".