Agreed. But the old system of “well this is really big so 9 months to two years maybe? We’ll be over there trying to finish it” isn’t nearly as appealing. How far along are we? “I don’t know 27%?”

But “here’s 20 steps averaging X points so it will take Y long and we can easily track progress” that agile promises is much more appealing. It may not speed up good teams. Or bad teams. It may slow things down some.

But managers like it.

Unfortunately, most teams wrongly estimate their time requirements and the last 10% is really more like 90% of the development time.