When I hear about Agile these days, it's almost always an excuse not to do the right thing. The last time it came up was someone resisting defining our company's product delivery process, which has always suffered from a lack of clarity. The time before that, it was someone saying "Let's be Agile about this", but meaning "let's do a shitty version of this, and pretend we'll come back to it later, rather than just moving on to the shitty version of the next feature."

The response that "you're not practicing Real Agile" may be true, but is unhelpful, as this is the norm rather than the exception. A consistent failure of any plan to succeed in its purpose after 25 years is a failure of that plan, not of the world, at least when the plan promises improvement on a shorter-than-generational timeline.

The only time I've ever seen Agile work is when the technical lead who practiced it was incredibly charismatic and forceful, and the team wanted to do what he said. Like magic. It worked great, and then the guy left, and the whole thing fell apart within months. But, I don't think what worked about that team was Agile per se, I think it was a unique individual leader that made it work, and it would have been just as successful without Agile.

I'm skeptical about methodologies. The force of the team and the company they're embedded in is so strong, it will overcome a generic system in most cases. I think you probably have to make an ad hoc solution that continually evolves, and have someone with rare abilities prune it and champion it. That is so harder. In all likelihood, muddling along is probably the realistic solution for most companies.

To a lot of folk, that's a feature! Capital A "Agile" is just sort of a pointer to "ayyy you've heard of other companies doing this" in a lot of people's minds.

I think we'd end up doing this no matter what. If it wasn't "agile" it would be "brisk methodology" or "go-minded development" or something. The reality is people sort of just like having hand-wavy terms that they definitely know other people have heard before, but have been given an ever shifting definition for.

To that point, I've started hearing people say "kanban" or "iterative planning", explicitly as opposition to agile. Yet, there are no actual changes to the process. All the people are still here, doing the same jobs with newly renamed meetings of the same length. But we are "fighting the agile lie" because we don't say agile!

IMO, teams figure out what works for them. Totally agree that methodologies are worth being skeptical about. If you hire sharp smart folks, they figure out a stable way of working. Muddling along isn't that bad if you have smart people muddling!