[bluGill]

The whole industry faces very real problems managing a large project. Agile promised to make thing better and nothing else did (lots of things before made the same promise - and failed to deliver), so on a few small success stories the industry jumped. However we are now realizing that despite some good ideas, agile didn't deliver the promise we wanted. That doesn't mean agile is bad just that it wasn't the "silver bullet" management wanted.

I don't think agile itself made all the promises that large projects wanted. However it made a few and then consultants seeing money jumped in and made more promises. Often agile couldn't deliver on the promises because there is good reason large projects can't allow engineers control over some of the things agile demanded engineers control.

Everyone wants to throw out Agile. However I don't see anything to replace it.

[randomdata]

> That doesn't mean agile is bad just that it wasn't the "silver bullet" management wanted.

Managers didn't want to be eliminated? Who'd a thunk it. Which is also why Agile is oft considered "bad" as management by and large never actually walked away, they just pushed some of workload off onto developers under the guise of "Agile" and half-ass adopted tools designed for a flat organizational structure in a hierarchical structure with all of the impedance mismatches to go along with that.

> Everyone wants to throw out Agile. However I don't see anything to replace it.

It's not so much that anyone, non-manager at least, wants to throw out Agile per se, but in this high (relatively, at least) interest rate environment there is more of a crackdown on the work people are doing, so managers are trying to reel back in the boring work they earlier tried to outsource onto developers in order to continue to justify their jobs. That is what has replaced it, so to speak.

[bluGill]

Upper management wants to get things done (and their golf game/whatever they do). They see software is expensive, late, and buggy.

Each middle manager wants to be the person who delivers and thus gets a promotion (eventually leading to upper management). If they eliminate other middle managers on the way that is okay (depending on politics of course).

[randomdata]

Yes, you bring up a good point about the other practical issue with adopting Agile. It says that the developers and the business people need to work together daily, as becomes necessary when there isn't a manager to act as the go-between, but as you point out the business people in reality just want to play golf, not become shared participants in the development process.

But, again, Agile is pretty clear that it requires special people. It was never meant for everyone. To observe it in a light where it is applicable to all organizations violates its very existence.