Agree. I think of Agile as sort of "the hill climbing of software development" (hill climbing as in the optimization algorithm). If you want to take the analogy

Agree. I think of Agile as sort of "the hill climbing of software development" (hill climbing as in the optimization algorithm). If you want to take the analogy to its logical conclusion it's really simulated annealing because in a refactoring you're allowed (with some probability) to back down from the hill in search of another slope. :) Agree about the line worker thing too, and that I think is a fundamental problem with most methodologies. Great authors write great books. Great programmers write great software. Any methodology that pretends there is a way around that I think is bound to fail.