People who work in sick environments will not be saved by Agile. These techniques are meant for teams that already have members who trust each other, in a comp

People who work in sick environments will not be saved by Agile. These techniques are meant for teams that already have members who trust each other, in a company that trusts the team, to work with customers they know, who would like a usable product that they can develop and extend the requirements for as they learn more about how it will work. It helps prevent the sicknesses that come from attempting to do all this up front, where an eager team and an innovative customer try to specify everything up front and nail down a price tag right away. It should be sold to management as a form of risk management, not as a way to extract more value from a fixed amount of dollars. If you have $4 million to spend, and you spend that up front, you may waste $4 million. If you spend it bit by bit, and have a functional system after every few weeks, that you can migrate to if you like, then you have not wasted any money, even if you end up throwing it away partway through. I agree with anyone who says the problem with Agile is that it is watered down. It was a least-common-denominator of all the various similar techniques, and I think a lot was lost by encouraging people to adopt Scrum instead of eXtreme Programming. Nevertheless, I've consulted on a lot of projects and there are environments in which I would not want to attempt to implement any new methodology. The people already hate each other and the system is totally sick. They need something more like Deming's management techniques where they get the top to commit to empowering the bottom, retrain and move out people who are in the wrong job, and get a remaining nucleus of players who trust each other to implement a new method (or their own). What ends up happening is programmers come into sick environments, run by "Agile" managers, and say that Agile is the problem and if they could just go back to their office and ignore everyone they could get it done. They're probably half right, in that they also need the full support of the customer. Since programmers are a noisy bunch, they complain far and wide about Agile, saying that it's the cause of all the diseases in their world. But sick systems often have names that are misleading. Deming once saw a poster on a client's break-room wall (or something) touting "Total Quality Management" and he said something to the effect of, "I hope that you aren't predisposed to think I'm wrong because of this", meaning that someone had already set up a sick system and claimed it was inspired by Deming.