+1 with government project this reflect my own experience. (EU) When a project hit a certain size and have a strict budget with hard deadlines (where hard mean

+1 with government project this reflect my own experience. (EU) When a project hit a certain size and have a strict budget with hard deadlines (where hard means: political party wants it done before their term ends or there is a time restriction on the budget's availability) agile just won't cut it. You cannot say at the end of the 1.5 year project that 40 programmers and managers worked on that "yeah sorry that last dozen features and 100 bugfixes did not make it to the last sprint". Also when there are several parties and subcontractors involved the "big design up front" stage is not optional anymore. QA is usually a third party who gets paid to find out if everything is according to the functional spec and documentation and enter at the later stage of a project. You simply cannot do agile in such an environment - though of course the documentation will contain the fact that you are indeed agile :D