This article isn't bad, but it misses the number 1 problem with Agile: Businesses are not agile. Some software teams might start out that way. Some start-ups ma

This article isn't bad, but it misses the number 1 problem with Agile: Businesses are not agile. Some software teams might start out that way. Some start-ups may be nothing but the software team in the beginning, with a CEO in name in order to attract funding. But all businesses are waterfall organizations. The moment a business signs its first meaningful contract (money will be exchanged, on this date, for some product that does x), the company is waterfall. The "best" (read: most agile) scenario is when the product team bends over backwards to completely isolate the dev team from the rest of the business and maintains the illusion that the dev team is operating in an agile manner while dealing with the rest of the business in business (read: waterfall terms). But the layers of abstraction in this scenario are too thick and too leaky. There's no reason to maintain this fiction, and I submit that it's also extremely unproductive and inefficient to do so. Every software engineer not at an early stage software startup is working at a waterfall company. We should stop pretending otherwise and come to grips with that reality and put more effort into coming up with better ways of dealing with that.