Reminds me of Winston Churchill's description of democracy being the "worst form of government, except for all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time

Reminds me of Winston Churchill's description of democracy being the "worst form of government, except for all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time to time" -- agile is the worst, except for all other methods. In reality, any system can be bad if you obsess on process over results. A product manager once told me that I was past the code freeze date of his 6-month (heavyweight/waterfall) release cycle so I'd have to wait 8 months...to get a single file changed. When a VP overruled him and forced the issue this guy called me up to angrily complain how much "extra work" this would be for him and his release process (and I was just passing along the request on behalf of the business). Buddy, if your software release process doesn't allow you to change a single file in < 10 months, you're doing something wrong. That's not to say Agile is a cure-all. I've worked at co.'s that insist on daily standup meetings so they can say they're "Agile", even if they have no practical value and are a time-suck. I've seen mid-level executives obsess over the terminology -- t-shirt sizes, stories, kanban, scrum, sprints -- mainly to sound impressive dropping jargon in front of their superiors, even if no actual progress is being made. Or they say they're "Agile" as an excuse to play "Etch-a-Sketch" with requirements, changing every few months because they're "iterating." That being said, I'll take Agile over Waterfall any day. There's just too many unknown unknowns in writing a specific type of application for the first time to gameplan everything out in mockups successfully. I think the bigger problem is mid-level bureaucracy at too many companies, and that would exist with or without Agile, IMHO.