As an enterprise developer (i.e. one of the guys working in the big, non-technical companies) I have been one to advocate and implement parts of agile on variou

As an enterprise developer (i.e. one of the guys working in the big, non-technical companies) I have been one to advocate and implement parts of agile on various projects. I will fully admit that Agile is mostly hype and that adhering closely to any methodology is mostly, if not entirely, futile. Steve and others are missing the point, when done right it forces conversation and it gives programmers a voice. In big non-technical companies everything is top-down, date-centric and programmers are just cogs. When we did agile, we essentially had some basic sprinting (make date people happy) and a strong feedback loop (give developers a voice after each sprint) and those two simple steps produced some amazing work. Dates will never go away in these kinds of companies, programmers will never be first class citizens, and some sort of process will always be demanded. Agile is not about how to get developers to be more efficient, it is about getting large non-technical organizations to bend (ever so slightly) to the will of the people actually producing the work.