[Vic-nyc]

I am a developer, and in the past I used to be a proponent of "agility". These days if I am interviewing for a job and I hear that the company is using "Agile practices", I generally try to avoid it like the plague.

I believe there are 3 main factors for software projects to succeed: one is the technology and the skill level of the tech team; the second, very important, are the business requirements (are we building the right thing, and with the right priorities?); the third is the level of communication between team members. Now "Agility" (Scrum/etc) really addresses only the 3rd point.

And herein lies the dogmatism that others have mentioned -- a lot of these companies who do "Agile" usually do so because they have serious problems, and they think "Agile" is a magic bullet that will solve them. This is extremely wrong and dangerous - if your problems are caused by crappy technology or (very often) by the fact that you don't understand what you're trying to build, then throwing scrum meetings at developers will alienate them even further.

What I also see in these companies that are so adamant about Scrum/etc, is management who doesn't understand technology. Therefore they use the "Agile" weapon as one of their only ways to give them a sense that they are in "control" of the situation. They neglect the other parts because they don't understand them.