Has Agile really worked for you as a Developer?
I have met a lot of people for whom Agile has worked really well, and most of them tend to be managers and architects who plan and delegate the work. However I really haven't found much good developers convinced that Agile is working for them.
Of course you can say if Agile isn't working for you, you aren't doing it right. But whatever remixes of Agile are out there, is it working for you as a Developer? And why? Does anyone else think, within a traditional (or close to) team structure, Agile feels more like a form of micromanagement than self-management?
Answer
At my first job, we had daily scrums, wrote automated tests, had automated builds, pair programmed, etc. We had been in the agile groove for several years. And for our efforts, we were rewarded with software that I wouldn't touch with 20ft pole. The quality of our product was atrocious: I'd describe as the piecemeal hacking of 100 amateur developers.
What went wrong:
The company I worked at had a notorious reputation for hiring entry-level developers for the lowest pay ($25-27K/yr was the norm), and frequently we'd outsource work to the lowest offshore bidder. I've heard that agile just doesn't work on inexperienced developers, and I think it showed through the code and our turnover rate.
No documentation of any sort. No functional documentation, no technical documentation, no requirements, no bug tracking. No one ever wrote things down on persistent media: all requirements and bugs were communicated by email, word of mouth, and psychic mindreading.
Lousy testing: our automated tests were invaluable, but QA and UAT testing was a disaster. Since we didn't have any formal requirements documentation, QA users didn't know what new functionality they were testing, so all QA consisted more or less of haphazard end-to-end testing. User acceptance testing was performed in production: we installed the product on our customers servers and reported bugs as they occurred in production.
Crisis-driven development: bugs were handled by using the "OMG WE HAVE TO FIX THIS AND REDEPLOY PRONTO! NOW NOW NOW! NO TIME FOR TESTING JUST FIX IT!" management methodology.
Although we did everything right and really adhered to agile principles by the book, the methodology failed harder than anything else I've ever seen.
In contrast, the company that I work for now uses a waterfall-like methodology, produces a few hundred pages of documentation for each project, has few automated tests but a sizable QA team. Interestingly, the quality of our product is through the roof, and the work environment is orders of magnitude above and beyond the other company.
I know many people have had the opposite experience. As is usually the case, methodologies are not a golden hammer --- you can probably start a successful project no matter what methodology you choose. In my experience on successful and unsuccessful projects, I get the feeling that methodology doesn't matter as much as environment: comfortable, happy developers and sane project managers are all it takes make a project work.