The Agile Manifesto has a lot of good ideas and was motivated by real world problems and how they were solved. The problem is like many other good ideas is tha

The Agile Manifesto has a lot of good ideas and was motivated by real world problems and how they were solved. The problem is like many other good ideas is that they evaporate in a cultural vacuum. Agile methods like Scrum and XP are based on the thought that introducing some rules can overcome culture. What happens in practice is that culture subverts those rules in order to reinforce itself. Resistance to change is a stronger force than any buzzword methodology or profound observations. This is further confounded by the very nature of software development as something that can't be distilled into a set of rules. Different situations require different approaches. Is all lost? I don't think so. Agile has contributed to the way people think about software development and gives the right team in the right culture more tools they can use in the right situations. It's not going to "fix" software development in general though.