[bmitc]

It's interesting to me that people are so into Agile when it simply doesn't work all by itself. How many books, conferences, certifications, practitioners, evangelists, etc. does it take to make a paradigm, supposedly the paradigm, of working actually work? Every company I have worked for that used Agile basically had broken processes and were not productive. The one job where we did not explicitly use Agile was actually a place where I produced the most useful work.

If the number one answer to we're using Agile but it's not working is "you're doing Agile wrong", then maybe Agile isn't the solution?

The way I worked at the place that did not have an explicit process was one of switching between agile and waterfall methods. Early on in the projects, the process was primarily waterfall, defining things up front, building prototypes, laying out the project, etc. Then once passed that stage, projects would enter into a more agile or iterative process. Then as new big features came in, back to waterfall and then switching to agile once that stabilized. This worked quite well.

[samsquire]

I think engineering effectiveness comes down to a people and communication problem.

Writing software well is difficult by itself and people are all different in understanding, experience and skill level. Throwing a group of people together and trying to build something that works for every scenario is a miracle given the complexity of software and the complexity of interpersonal relationships and organisations (see Conway's law). I'm impressed by every multiplatform language or tool or software. It's a lot of work!

If everybody did things the same way i.e the agile way and if agile was proven to work and everyone followed it the way it was intended and designed, then maybe we could all be interoperable and easily work together and produce projects that don't fail. That's the fantasy.

To be fair I've been 6 years worth of agile projects and I was never on a project that failed.