[CountHackulus]

I worked at IBM for 5 years, and some of the teams I was on used "agile" development methods. In that they used the names, but our "scrums" were an hour long, in a meeting room, with everyone bringing their laptop. Management more than 1 level up expected waterfall-like development, so it all just meshed badly.

I really don't hold out much hope that this is going to work out that well without a whole bunch of training and people actually wanting it.

[oldmanjay]

I spent a long time at a boutique consultancy that specialized in rescuing at-risk software projects for fortune 100 firms. Mainly, that meant we got very, very good at building up waterfall adapters for our internal processes.

I won't say we were following agile, exactly, but the concept remains approximately the same. Big company management thrives on the mistaken notion that they can plan out the world years in advance. The key insights that made our adapters work were 1) no one has enough of a memory to hold anyone to those plans even six months down the line and 2) no one expects anything to work anyway, since they're all used to their plans falling over.

Which isn't to say this is going to work. I suspect that, like all things recent IBM, any success they find will be more attributable to inertia than execution excellence.

edit: clarification

[wimagguc]

I second that simply based what I've seen on InterConnect and my experience with IBM devs or Watson so far. What they do might be agile, but then, what everyone else does isn't.

[vonmoltke]

That sounds exactly like the DOD's idea of "agile". It's a nightmare, and made me consider agile a swear word by the time I left.

[ebiester]

I was a contractor for them in 2007-8 and the project was using the "agile" label back then. It was anything but agile, but I can see why so many people hate agile if their experiences were like that.

[theandrewbailey]

My manager almost set up a regular "scrum" meeting a month ago. The lead programmer and I spoke up, disputed it, and got it changed.

[grecy]

I work at a Telco - you just described my daily activities perfectly.