What I find is that I teach agile as being results and value driven first, everything else doesn't matter. All the stuff like TDD and BDD are just canned versions of patterns other teams have found useful -- each team can take them or leave them (assuming that they understand them first -- many teams are all too willing to ditch things that they have no idea what they are talking about. Helping teams make these decisions is a big part of coaching)

The fascinating thing is that once I teach that it's all flexible, guess what? People come in and make it all rigid and orthodox anyway. It's not Agile that's the problem, it's the people that, over and over again, just beat the living hell out of agile trying to make it into some rigid 1-2-3 formula for success. No matter how I beg and plead with them not to do this, still they persist. Strange.

I'm left with the conclusion that the basic problem in software development is people's fear of having a truly unpredictable, flexible, and open way of working -- even the agile adherents (especially the agile adherents, it seems). That's simply too much for some folks. They'd rather have a fixed list of things to do each day, even if they know the list is full of crap, they are taking ten times longer than they should, and they are doing busywork things that provide no value. As an example, I've had teams be very successful keeping their list of things to do on post-its on a wall. Then I leave for a year and come back and they've got some kind of spreadsheet monstrosity that has hundreds of items nobody can remember. Nobody likes the new system (except for perhaps the person who runs it, who will also admit that they don't like it, but only in private), it doesn't fit their needs, it's a huge time sink, yet they don't know how to make it stop. They are prisoners of their own need for fixed systems and over-engineering everything. This is because somehow they feel by over-engineering things that they make them "safer". Even though at some level they realize that this is not the case at all. Very strange.

@pragdave recently gave a keynote speech at the Magic Ruby conference and made a big point of saying "Agile is not a noun." Agile isn't about subscribing to practices and then writing everything in stone. It's about doing that works for you situation.

So don't blame 'Agile' for being inflexible, blame the people who are using it for not actually being it.

The rub with agile is people conflate process with communication. Things agile (hopefully) expedite commuincation, however, are only as good as those who guide it. So perhaps, more precarious.

It's not a blue pill.