I know - it does come across as the one-true-scotsman argument at times. Disclaimer: I'm a fan of agile. I even seem to be turning into one of those evil consu

I know - it does come across as the one-true-scotsman argument at times. Disclaimer: I'm a fan of agile. I even seem to be turning into one of those evil consultant people in my old age (but only just recently - and I still code :-) I'd urge agile sceptics to put aside some of the crap they see in the real world. Go take a look at the original sources (e.g. both of Beck's books on XP are fun reads - and short :-). Take a look at the Scrum guide (http://www.scrum.org/Scrum-Guides http://www.scrum.org/Scrum-Guides) - it's only 16 pages long. Does that look like a heavy process? Agile got popular in the early 00's coz it helped many teams get better. It then suffered the curse of getting popular. Everybody and their dog started doing it badly, or relabelling what they were doing already as agile. Pretty much every agile method came from developers. XP in particular was process that came from developers observing what worked well for them. Ditto Cockburn's Crystal methods. Scrum worked so well because it kept management out of the loop during sprint development (and that's also one of it's failings... but that's a different argument :-) To pick a pure development analogy. Large chunks of the OO code I see isn't really OO code. It's some procedural code and some pure data structures wrapped up into classes and methods. Because of this it doesn't reap the benefits that good OO code provides. Because I've seen good OO code, and because I can write vaguely decent OO code, I can see that. I can see the difference between the surface artefacts (classes and methods) and the underlying philosophy of an OO breakdown. It's the same deal with agile a the moment. There are lots of places that are "doing agile" that are only touching upon a couple of the surface artefacts, but not actually making any of the philosophical changes that mean they build better code. For me this doesn't mean agile sucks, any more than it means object-orientation sucks.