My experience of &quot;agile&quot; was that every hack-and-fix shop in the universe heard a telephone-game version of &quot;stop doing boring stuff you never liked anyway&quot; and stapled a carboard sign saying &quot;WE ARE AGILE!&quot; above the doorway.<p>Meanwhile, nothing changes.<p>The only successful agile method I&#x27;ve personally seen work is XP, and it requires enormous and near-universal discipline. In that respect it is <i>no different from pre-Agile methods that worked</i>.<p>Agile isn&#x27;t about jettisoning good software practices. It&#x27;s about making them smaller. And the signers of the Agile Manifesto weren&#x27;t the first to think of it. All the ideas were in the literature, in the open, for decades before they coalesced. Even the concept of taking necessary activities and shrinking them is old -- Watts Humphreys beat everyone to it with the Personal Software Process, which is the CMMI shrunk down to the scale of a single engineer.<p>Disclaimer: I work for one of the most notoriously pro-agile shops of all -- Pivotal Labs. Before I came here I was skeptical. Now I&#x27;m notoriously pro-agile, with a generous dash of No True Agile Methodology.