Comment Agile needs a standardized pipeline. No one has th (Score 1) 507
Unlike other methods (and I'm strechting the term "method" here), agile methods rely on excellent optimised and product oriented software production pipelines. This is how you should do it anyway, agile or not. But in my experience roughly 1 in 20 software shops implement even the flakiest of standardised production. Most of the time you still have to explain to people why they should use versioning.
The decision makers, sales people and IT strategists also usually have a very hard time commiting to a product and produktion pipeline. They want to sell whatever goes and have the devs sort it out, understaffed, ill-equipped and with extra weekends.
There are a few companies that have sales and technology and perhaps even industrial design/user experience all on par (Apple for example), but most companies that offer software development have no decision makers that understand even the faintest about software development.
Agile methods such as Scrum are the ones that expose the fastest wether you actually are doing professional development or if your crew is just a bunch of people faking it with poor gouvernment, bad organsiation and a sales and production team that don't communicate professionally with each other. IT mostly is a second and third afterthought with most companies and in such environments the best method won't improve development, no matter what.
If a PM can't tell a client from a server or Java from JavaScript and couldn't be bothered to understand why it is important to make a call and a final decision about tabs or spaces Agile will show how shitty your environment is in an instant. Waterfall (i.e. we don't know what we're doing but we're doing it anyway) will disguise that indefinitely, because there's no fixed model for accountability built in.
Bottom line: Until IT stops being the cellar child of the company no method in the world will professionalise development as it is desperately needed. We're still like medicine in the 16th century in that regard.