Agile Gone Bad?
Agile ain’t agile no more when adopted as the official enterprise software development process. The problem with agile is “agile != flexible”.
Agile was born in the world of contractors who have to show something for the money at every status meeting. For a while clients let themselves fooled with use cases written on many hundreds of pages but this doesn’t work no more. They smartened up and demanded to see something working, for a change. Agile came in handy because it allows to show a prototype early on. As long as you keep adding features to it and you are able to demo them there is a good chance your contract will be extended.
While in theory the Agile methodologies tell you to be flexible, the cruel reality is that most people that apply them don’t think a lot before taking the manual and enforcing every bullet point with a thick stick.
via Software development dogmata - good practices gone bad | Little Tutorials.