From my experience, his is a sober assessment that is worth a read since to be successful with agile you need to think about the mitigations.
However, to help you along, in a couple of days, I'll give you my 10 Agile Strengths to counterbalance Patti's list.
I'll leave to Donald's blog to explain these, but here are his ten, some of which [like #2, #3] sound like they should be--could be advantages but they can be weaknesses in the wrong circumstances.
And, be careful reading too much into some of these, like #7. 7 is really referring to refactoring. Refactoring is a way to meet quality standards; by other names it's been around long before anyone thought of agile per se:
1. Agile is rarely practiced
2. Heavy customer interaction is needed
3. Agile thrives with co-located teams
4. Agile has difficulty scaling
5. Agile is weak on architecture planning
6. Agile has limited project planning and measurement
7. Agile requires more rework
8. Challenges making contractural commitments
9. Agile increases potential threats to business continuity and knowledge transfer
10. Agile lacks the attention to outside integration
Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
