I hear quite a bit about Agile development methodologies and their use in business, but I'm beginning to wonder if anyone REALLY does Agile development.
When I was CIO, we "sort-of" did agile development, that is we tried to enforce it, but because interference from on high, we typically had problems with iterations. The CEO didn't get Agile and was constantly saying things like, "Right, but can't we just insert a little time in the process for working on stuff that Marketing comes up with during the iteration?" and "Right, but you're planning on slack time in the iteration, right?" Plus, he always wanted to see things spelled out in detail before we did anything. Although we usually did a pretty good job with Agile development, I'm beginning to think that successful agile is not the norm.
More examples: Every position I've interviewed for so far in this process either "wants" to implement agile or is using a "modified" version of agile. Both of those indicate that agile is a pipe dream. Where I'm working now supposedly uses scrum, but there are no meetings, no interaction with business owners, no task assignments, no design, no use cases, no scrums, no structure, no nothing.
At one interview, agile was described as being totally out of control. Basically, they couldn't use it because their timeline, features, and resources were all fixed, therefore, Agile wouldn't work (huh?). Makes me wonder how frequently they really hit their targets.
Another interviewer, the person professed to use agile but then pushed really hard to determine what requirement documents and functional specs I would produce before I started coding, and how do I handle the turn over of the code to the testing department at the end of the development project. Hmm--that doesn't sound like waterfall to me at all!
These aren't the only experiences I've seen. Does anyone have an experience of where Agile has worked for a normal company with success? How did you get around these barriers in thinking? Does the "Agile should be adapted for your environment" clause give people the freedom to wrap SDLC in pseudo-agile and call it Agile?