Ever notice that virtually all Agile success stories are written by Agile consultants and not by developers? Ever notice that nobody actually claims to have built anything from scratch with Agile?
The stories all read the same. Product has already been built. Developers stuck bike shedding over some piddly detail, when lo and behold the Agile consultant arrives to cut through the Gordian knot by placing the developers on a strict regimen of myopic thinking and inattention to detail.
I was a team lead/architect for a project, we built an online booking engine and fare quoting system for an Airline. They pull in ~$1.5bn a year through this channel. We delivered under budget, with almost zero known issues, 1 day late (due to some internal infrastructure).
ALL DONE USING AN AGILE METHOD!
Today that original team of 6 is now a department of 70. They still use Agile/Lean methods (FDD & KanBan), continuously deliver successful projects and win numerous awards etc...
I worked at a cool little company where we built a useful product. We just built it. We didn't use waterfall, agile, or any real process. We just made sure to communicate and only hired people with good judgement and critical thinking skills. A big (very big) company decided they liked our product and bought the company.
After acquisition, our new overlords decided that our process, i.e. using our brains, wasn't compliant with whatever standards they had for development. In came the agile consultants, scrum masters, TDD, CI, etc. All the things you hear these blog posts evangelize about. It brought development to a total halt as all these assholes put in their $0.02 about how we needed scrums, sprints, user stories, and story points. Developers couldn't work on the features they knew were important without cutting through miles of red tape (finding a "customer" to make a story, breaking that story down into the actual work that needed to be done, moving the story through the backlog, estimating points for the stories, etc).
Like I said above. It ruined my software department. I wouldn't wish agile on my worst enemy.
Ahhh it actually sounds like your team was originally being Agile
This statement is unfalsifiable; this kind of retroactive defense makes Agile out to be an ever-moving goalpost. If any effective, basically "good," organic team behaviour was "Agile" to begin with, there is no identifiable differentiating criterion of Agile methodology from any other mode of small-scale collaboration.
Interesting point. The thing is, any Agile method is supposed to evolve with the team. Long running Agile teams are often not following any one methodology but rather using the best bits of a bunch of them, in a way that works for the team.
This stuff is mostly common sense so you will find that many small teams are often Agile even if they don't know it. Modern software dev is really more about effective communication and collaboration then technology and tools.
My take on it is: If what you are doing aligns with the Agile Manifesto and its Principles, then you are Agile even if you are not doing TDD, peer-programming, daily stand ups etc. No matter what the zealots are telling you to the contrary.
Agreed. Another way of putting this: Agile is best practices for iterative, incremental development. Applied agile means borrowing/stealing practices from others, and more importantly creating and adapting your own processes to your particular team.
While I think you're trying to be critical, you've actually hit on a key point in agile.
Agile is about principles, not procedures.(I speak of litte-a agile, not big-A agile). It also emphasizes people, not artifacts. Because of this, two things naturally occur: 1) Whether or not you are "doing" agile is a judgement call, not discoverable by a formal prof or checklist, and 2) agile is more like playing the piano than learning calculus. You don't learn it by watching a film about it or reading a book: you learn by doing it and getting better over time.
You can look at this as "moving the goalposts" if you like, or you can look at it as optimizing for each circumstance. I think realizing that there are no goalposts is one of the stages of actually getting it. (and there are many folks in the agile camp who have not gotten it yet)
The stories all read the same. Product has already been built. Developers stuck bike shedding over some piddly detail, when lo and behold the Agile consultant arrives to cut through the Gordian knot by placing the developers on a strict regimen of myopic thinking and inattention to detail.
Agile is bullshit.