> For APIs, backward compatibility, mostly.

But you can still evolve APIs; breaking changes can occur much less than normal changes. And even then you can version them and run old and new in parallel if you want. I don't see why that would be slow.

I also don't see why making things in a way that's hard to change suddenly makes something amenable to agile.

I think maybe our wires got crossed somewhere.

I have never advocated for "agile", for any purpose. Ironically, IMHO "agile" is silly make work (ceremony) and too heavy weight. I was just trying to steelman the original justification for "agile" methods.

The PMI based processes my prior teams used had minimal communication and project mgmt overhead and very little drama. I see no reason why IT / web projects shouldn't be similarly managed. It's just that PMI is now like a lost art.

I only mentioned "test into prod" because I'm very curious about its methodology innovations. I think it would have better modeled and explained some of my prior experiences.

For instance, one of my teams would live code and then commit to prod changes while we were talking with our customers (for immediate verification and so forth). Almost zero overhead or ceremony.

We just came up with that system intuitively and couldn't really explain ourselves to others. (We had one senior VP in particular who reacted very negatively to our processes.) If we had the "test into prod" narrative, maybe things would have gone better.