I don't disagree about the hypocrisy of the folks who have redefined the Agile movement to be something that is decidedly not Agile.
That said, the thing I dislike about this new "Agile has failed" meme is that it discounts how much the movement has changed the status quo. Sure it make sense now that small iterative releases, continuous integration, automated tests, customer collaboration, etc will produce better software. And yes there were teams that did this before Agile became popular, but it certainly wasn't the norm.
There used to be no standard way to write/run unit tests. The class of software called continuous integration server did not exist. Gant charts were completely normal planning devises.
I've worked in environments that literally believed that a senior developer could use uml to design the entire system down to the method level and then it would be a trivial matter for a junior developer to "fill it in". That sounds insane now, but it happened throughout the software industry.
Agile didn't fail, it worked so well it became the norm, and now the term is being co-opted by opportunists. That's sad, but let's not let that detract from the very real success story of the Agile software movement.
I agree with much of what you've said, but I have to pick on this remark:
"And yes there were teams that did this before Agile became popular, but it certainly wasn't the norm."
And there are now lots of teams not doing it but calling what they do "agile" because they're engaging in cargo cult practices. A whole bunch of stupidity is simply painted with agile terminology (e.g. unfocused daily meetings that are referred to as "standups").
That said, the thing I dislike about this new "Agile has failed" meme is that it discounts how much the movement has changed the status quo. Sure it make sense now that small iterative releases, continuous integration, automated tests, customer collaboration, etc will produce better software. And yes there were teams that did this before Agile became popular, but it certainly wasn't the norm.
There used to be no standard way to write/run unit tests. The class of software called continuous integration server did not exist. Gant charts were completely normal planning devises.
I've worked in environments that literally believed that a senior developer could use uml to design the entire system down to the method level and then it would be a trivial matter for a junior developer to "fill it in". That sounds insane now, but it happened throughout the software industry.
Agile didn't fail, it worked so well it became the norm, and now the term is being co-opted by opportunists. That's sad, but let's not let that detract from the very real success story of the Agile software movement.