I ask myself some similar questions. I worked for a huge Brazilian ERP company. Three years ago the board decided that the company was not realizing its full p

I ask myself some similar questions. I worked for a huge Brazilian ERP company. Three years ago the board decided that the company was not realizing its full potential (which I agree with) and decided to give Agile a try. Since then, some really critical areas started to suffer a lot, the latest version is being heavily criticized by the users and the company's reputation is consistently going down. The answer seems obvious: they are doing Agile wrong, they missed the point entirely, the "big company" mindset is hindering the efforts and so on. This is, in fact, how the whole company is behaving about the poor results so far, treating any suggestion towards a Agile's rollback as a cabal proof of the company's inability in delivering software the proper way. But I dare to think that Agile might not be the only path. Most of the companies around are delivering fairly complex projects employing small and efficient and competent teams and this is really great. But some companies are not that lucky. Somebody has to build that monstrous stuff over two-decade-old legacy code foundations, employing many dozens of teams. You simply can't afford hiring the best people around, because they are not available nor willing to work for you and, anyway, there aren't enough of them. You can't work with the best users, because you have no control at all over their teams and they aren't too excited about you bothering them with your project -- and this is bad because users in Agile projects are a critical part of the team. You may somehow enforce them to work with you and this has already been made many times, but the resultant half-hearted participations are not worth the hassle. There are so many practical issues regarding a real-world agile culture implementation, so many out-of-control environmental variables affecting you very negatively, and they all seem to end up being buried under a set of principles which have allegedly worked somewhere else. As if it were easy, or even desirable, to blame your context for not being "mature enough" to adopt Agile. I've never seriously looked into it, but I believe that there are some rigorous academic case studies discussing cases where agile didn't work well. Although I believe they are scarce, both because Agile tend to fail in a smaller, yet important, set of projects, and also because they would hurt some strong beliefs which are currently being taken as common-sense. I also believe their analysis may occasionally show some bias too, perhaps focusing more on the "mistakes" made by the teams instead of considering the hypothesis of Agile being inappropriate in the analyzed case.