I started my career back in the mid-80's and so I've lived with the process being described here. Kent Beck was a breath of fresh air and we all thought yes, th

I started my career back in the mid-80's and so I've lived with the process being described here. Kent Beck was a breath of fresh air and we all thought yes, this is what we've actually been doing! Mostly. Here's the thing: in some ways I think what we were doing back then was better. I just noted XP was essentially what we were doing anyway. Different teams and projects essentially chose their own internal methodology depending on what worked best for the project. Waterfall was what was presented to the project stakeholders. What does that mean? Paradoxically, we actually had more flexibility back then! Thanks to the tooling, which more or less standardizes the methodology, and all the Agile Coaches which have been trained on that tooling and standardized methodology - Agile today isn't very, well, agile - at least not from a development perspective. People point out that Agile allows for the requirements to change. No it doesn't. That's not a magic wand. Requirement changes still have project delivery impacts. Agile doesn't make that go away. It just provides for smaller iterations which facilitate the management of requirement changes. Know what? Iterative Waterfall, which we had been doing since the 80's (actual Waterfall is an artifact from the 70') also allowed for that. Now I live in a world of WaterScrumFall, which is absolutely the worst of all worlds.