> You have to realise that before Agile, a fair portion of all software development projects that were started would simply bust and never get shipped. I have

> You have to realise that before Agile, a fair portion of all software development projects that were started would simply bust and never get shipped. I have plenty of gripes with Agile, but there's definitely a "victim of its own success" aspect to the whole thing. "Agile in name only" is frustrating compared to a good system, but in many cases it's still far better than what came before it. Basic ideas like "we should expect requirements to change" and "if the programmer doesn't know what their code will be used for, something is wrong" weren't necessarily accepted prior to agile. Projects that are chaotic, mismanaged messes under AINO might well have been orderly deathmarches or cancelled outright in the past. Some of this progress is technological (source control, post-release patching, digital distribution), but some of it really does owe to Agile. It reminds me a bit of the scientific method. The elaborate eight-step thing taught in school feels like silly boilerplate, but it's shocking to realize that "ideas are tested by experiment" was a genuine breakthrough from a past that made major choices like disease treatments and scurvy cures based on 'reasoning' without testing them at all.