Agile

Having been on Agile teams that were mostly Agile, and Agile teams that were mostly not Agile. I agree with these two posts by Nathan over at Design, Code, Release : Agile is... and Agile methodologies are just tools.

As with most things, the people who know the least about a subject are usually the most dogmatic about it, and those who know the most rarely talk about it. This most certainly applies to the different Agile shops I've been in.  The most Agile development shops involve a lot of team communication, support, and respect--respect of the company for the team, respect of the team members for each other and respect of the team members for the company.

On these great teams, we talked, we helped, we supported, we did stand ups, we did sprints and sprint plannings, and backlogs, and retrospectives, and demos.  We adapted, and were given almost complete control over  what we did, how we did it, and most of the time when we delivered, Agile was our tool.  Great carpenters rarely talk about hammers and screw drivers.  The find the best, they learn how to use them, and then go about doing what needs to be done: one has tools to build, one does not build in order to talk about tools.

Nothing in Agile is set in stone.  The purpose of Agile is to allow for communication, adapt to ceaseless changes from the business, and to build great products.