I was exposed when it was still eXtreme Programming (back when "extreme" was the most nineties adjective you could have) and didn't much care for it then. I ke

I was exposed when it was still eXtreme Programming (back when "extreme" was the most nineties adjective you could have) and didn't much care for it then. I keep hearing it touted as this kind of universal cure-all but I just do not think it is applicable everywhere. On a personal level, the more any given thing is touted to me as the solution for any and all problems, the more suspicious I grow. The more fervor, the more I draw away. The more cultish it seems (convert, adhere, rituals, special names, and then finally the narcissism of small differences in practice as exemplified by that old Emo Williams routine), the less I want to participate. The more I have seen it shoehorned into places where it seemed ill-suited, the more this was revealed to me, yet the evangelism continues. Nothing like watching the tape backup guy, suffering from a flare of gout, hobble over to a room to perform his "stand-up" routine to hammer that home. Of course, we "probably weren't doing it right," but the more I have seen the slavish adherence to the strictures of Agile the more it seemed like this was an exercise in polishing a boss' resume so that he could say he had done The Things when he went elsewhere. Reader, he did. Perhaps the Agile that can be critiqued is not the eternal Agile.