my money's on the latter. agile, like any process, can be abused by those who don't understand or are too process-oriented.
If there is no way to tell, does it matter?
I mean, if Agile requires a perfect implementation, support from everybody, very smart people and luck, is it any good? If I have all that, I can do whatever with any methodology.
It's easy to see the flaw in many failed implementations: they don't manage their schedules, they don't have successful iterations, they don't manage their technical investments, and the only thing they don't do that agile suggests isn't usually worth doing is writing lots of specifications and documentation beforehand.
Is it also also easy to correct the flaw? I don't mean to blame Agile practices. It could be the case that Agile is a bad fit to some "corporate cultures" or certain project type and the result of someone pushing hard its adoption is to have some practices really used and other only in appearance. This could be what people hates.
OK. that would not be "True Agile", but what difference makes for the poor guy that's forced to play a part?
Edit: I've had Scrum in mind all the time when writting "Agile". Sorry.
Not at all. If everyone involved in the project (everyone with a stake in the success of the project) agrees to give an agile process an honest chance, great. If not, you'll have trouble. A similar rule applies for coding standards, for test coverage, for security and logging, for transactional safety, for dieting, and for getting out of debt.
I have yet to see an "unsuccessful" project using agile, as in the customer and team was not happy with the conclusion (I've been involved with > 10). Usually things change before that point is reached.
If the team cannot change when things start sucking, then things will continue to suck, regardless of methodology or lack of. Most teams can adjust (at least the ones I want to be a part of).
The question I was responding to was if all the problems were caused by Agile or by deficiencies in its implementation.
If all you've seen is succesful projects, you can only guess why failed ones fail.
True. The project I have been a part of do have problems though. Sometimes the problems get resolved quickly and sometimes it takes a while or never happens.
Failure comes in many forms. I'm not pretending to have encyclopedic knowledge over the various ways projects fail. I do know that issues arise on the team and good communication often helps resolve these issues.
Also, having a good attitude is important. It's easy to be negative to your teammates (I have this problem), but it's also harmful and inappropriate at times.
In my experience, the biggest issues (or the largest cause of my stress) were often issues within the team.