A good article but I don't believe that the points presented in the article support the conclusion "why it never really works". "An alarming number of people... believe that Agile is a project management methodology, and that Agile really means SCRUM, XP, Kanban..." Why is it alarming for anyone to believe this? "I was once told by an Agile Trainer (LOL) that the correct way to phrase the requirement..." OK - so that doesn't make much sense to me. "Needless to say his company lost a $m project on the back of such BS" Companies can fail for lots of different reasons - and perhaps this particular Agile Trainer contributed and then again maybe not. That particular Agile Trainer may have been incompetent or misrepresented. The company may have failed for any number of different reasons. So I don't think that this example supports that conclusion. "Agile (big 'A' again) has become a bit of an albatross - it doesn't really work, it doesn't deliver the benefits it promised" I found that the article moved too quickly to this conclusion.
You could argue that that wasn't the main point of the article - but if that is the case then I would suggest that the title is a little too provoctive and the first few paragraphs are irrelevant. I enjoyed the article but I think that it would have been better if it simply didn't try to suggest that Agile never really works and just put forward what agile means to you. If the article was called "What agile means to me" and started from the line "agility [...] is a wonderful thing" it would have been great.
See my comment above - I didn't actually think that much about the article before submitting it - my fault. Re. your comment that the post moved too quickly to the conclusion that Agile doesn't work - you're right, I don't really provide much evidence of that - but I do stand by the statement, and the tile of the article - in my experience (most of which is not in this post) it doesn't - at least not in the manner in which it was sold in to the software community.
Your piece nailed it. I'm not sympathetic to mmeadows' caveats. They ignore the fact that Agile (aka XP, Scrum) has sold itself as a Magic Bullet (per Brooks) for a long time. Big-A Agile proponents need to chose between big claims and plausible excuses -- they can't have both.
You could argue that that wasn't the main point of the article - but if that is the case then I would suggest that the title is a little too provoctive and the first few paragraphs are irrelevant. I enjoyed the article but I think that it would have been better if it simply didn't try to suggest that Agile never really works and just put forward what agile means to you. If the article was called "What agile means to me" and started from the line "agility [...] is a wonderful thing" it would have been great.