This is good stuff. I personally don’t relate to the gamification — I don’t like games, and I know a-lot of people who feel the same way — but the DOD has some good things in it: particularly “It is deployed in relevant environments”.

I’d like to focus on that: it means (I think) that the story has been integration tested, end to end.

Integration is where Agile often fails in organizations that have complex digital platforms. That’s why Companies such as Google had to develop DevOps methods — because of scale.

Klaus Leopold’s recent book, Rethinking Agile: Why Agile Teams Have Nothing to Do With Business Agility, connects the dots on this nicely, even though he does not get into the more technical dimensions of the problem, which are just as important (just ask Google).