I do think well-functioning development processes & teams, with good integration with business is something every company wants, but very few companies are willing to pay for, and most just cannot accept that they're opting out of what they claim they want by not paying enough, so they try to get it anyway.
Why's it expensive? I think people who are capable of building and managing such teams, and dragging organizations into a set of processes that truly work, exist at a rate of about 1/1000 the demand for them. Meanwhile the people who can discern useful practices from useless ones or good implementation from bad are similarly rare and overlap largely with that same group, leading to an ecosystem of development practices that's almost entirely snake oil and wishful thinking, and where almost no-one can tell when they're looking at one of those 1/1000 folks who've got the knowledge and skills to make it work if you give them the authority, or some delusional schmuck or huckster.
The best most companies can do is to learn to live with a ton of uncertainty and work humanely and effectively with that, and few achieve even this lesser outcome, which tends to come with its own (lower) costs in hours and less-than-ideal predictability that many orgs just can't accept they have to pay to keep things running even sort-of smoothly.
Why's it expensive? I think people who are capable of building and managing such teams, and dragging organizations into a set of processes that truly work, exist at a rate of about 1/1000 the demand for them. Meanwhile the people who can discern useful practices from useless ones or good implementation from bad are similarly rare and overlap largely with that same group, leading to an ecosystem of development practices that's almost entirely snake oil and wishful thinking, and where almost no-one can tell when they're looking at one of those 1/1000 folks who've got the knowledge and skills to make it work if you give them the authority, or some delusional schmuck or huckster.
The best most companies can do is to learn to live with a ton of uncertainty and work humanely and effectively with that, and few achieve even this lesser outcome, which tends to come with its own (lower) costs in hours and less-than-ideal predictability that many orgs just can't accept they have to pay to keep things running even sort-of smoothly.