[AnimalMuppet]

I've actually been on a team that did agile well. (XP, which is a subset.) It worked just like it was supposed to...

... until an upper manager couldn't understand our progress without documents the way he was used to. He also insisted on a large increase of scope without a change of schedule. And that was that.

It wasn't that we were failing to deliver. It was that upper management couldn't handle the lack of their normal process.

It also put too much pressure on the person playing the "customer" role - perhaps because we were a very large XP team (30 people).

It worked well as long as management let it, though. We delivered some releases, with solid, maintainable code, on time.

[the_af]

But that's shows the problem, right?

If management ends up interfering, and since Agile is supposed to be "about people", and management is people, Agile seems to be just as prone to mismanagement as other practices/principles, right?

I didn't mean that within a small team it doesn't work. I think there is merit to lowercase-a agile. But if capital-A Agile -- which is supposedly all about communication* -- fails to communicate with upper management, then where does that leave us?