In modern use, "agile" means little more than "not waterfall". As such, it's hard to tell if agile works because sprinkling even a little bit of agile dust on

In modern use, "agile" means little more than "not waterfall". As such, it's hard to tell if agile works because sprinkling even a little bit of agile dust on a project means it's "agile." Then again, I come from a RAD background, and I don't like how the rich description of different models and approaches, like what Steve McConnell described in "Rapid Development", had mostly devolved into a more ambiguous "agile." On a bit of a tangent, I came across papers from industrial process management that made a similar complaint about Toyota's continuous improvement method. Quoting from the introduction to http://freyssenet.com/?q=node/748 http://freyssenet.com/?q=node/748 : > With this book I hope we are able to show that Toyotism or ‘lean production’ as presented in the bestseller The Machine that Changed the World by Womack, Jones and Rose (1991), is not, as they seem to claim, the only possible industrial organization of the future. http://www.design4change.com/LinkedDocuments/Torslanda%20to%20Uddevalla%20via%20Kalmar.pdf http://www.design4change.com/LinkedDocuments/Torslanda%20to%... calls it a "humanistic alternative" and "Socio-technical", and "Reflective production". Do these alternatives also apply to software development? Would they even better? The agile software people I've talked to have never heard of these alternatives.