My spicy opinion on agile—pretty much any software development methodology—is that the method is never and has never been the problem. Agile can work. Scrum can work. Waterfall can work.
The problem has always been management and executives and their obsession with command and control tactics. If you don’t fix management, shuffling things around on the dev side won’t matter one jot.
Read the original papers on waterfall-style dev and you’ll find that they are eerily similar to many agile approaches.
The dev methodology has never been the problem. The problem has always been management.
@baldur I agree. If you read what the phased model folks were saying (like Benington) it's not too far away from the foundations of good software delivery.
You'd make pragmatic adjustments based on the invention of tools like source control, build servers, deployment automation - and to account for the huge difference in economics.
@baldur None of the papers I studied advocated for command and control (or top-down programming as Benington called it).
I wrote down my thoughts here:
Baldur Bjarnason
Steve Fenton ➜