How do you Convince an Agile Skeptic?

+1 - Nuff said :)

Of course Agile is here to stay: it is ‘time and materials’ thus it is very profitable to the people doing the work;
It is double profitable because it is easy to portray ‘activity’ as real progress;
Focus on short term deliverables easily leads to hacks and lack of thoughtfulness causing a lot of rework. That can to be mitigated when there is somebody why really understand what needs to be done, but often is not because reward for ‘not understanding’ is quite substantial.

That's why Agile is rubbish, just a general term (used as marketing term mostly), there is nothing special about it... most of companies/teams have always been forging their own processes. To me, "Agile" term fits better as a name of the current era of software industry evolution, a name only.

I saw a comment that agile was abject surrender on the part of IT. In general terms I don't agree but I do know what the author meant. In theory you can constantly refactor and react to change demanded by the business but in reality the amount of change demanded by the business increases beyond the resources available to enact that change.
I'm still not sure that the agile development copes well with processes where a good look ahead is essential.
In some respects agile strikes me as driving a high speed in foggy conditions and no map.

Whether it's "agile" or anything else, what's the "return on investment" on trying to convince someone of something when their mind is already made up? It may be a better use of your time to help someone else who is actually interested; a better use of their time, too.

the problem with 'agile' is that it has been co-opted by managers who only want the short deadlines and nothing else

abraham lincoln once asked "how many legs would a dog have if you called his tail a leg?"

the correct answer is 4, because calling the tail a leg doesn't make it a leg


calling a dysfunctional scheduling obsession 'agile' by having daily stand-up meetings does not an agile process make

I've often thought the agile community isn't selling what our customers want. We talk about values and principles that are so abstract they don't resonate at all. 'Customers' (AKA organizations that bring in coaches) want tools and processes to help them work better.

They often don't realize how difficult change is and expect Agile is a function of engineering/IT and has no effect on the rest of the organization. There are many factors contributing to the perception that Agile is broken.

There are tons of posts of "I've been using Scrum successfully for years..." all over linked in and google groups, there are people that just don't get it, there are coaches who aren't considering the culture and pace the organization transforming can support and the list goes on and on.

What Agile is all about is taking data that is made visible and giving the business an opportunity to make better decisions. That's it. Whether Scrum/XP/Kanban/Scrum-but/Butt-ban/<fancy method name here> fit the bill, that's fine. Pick what works to help you solve your organizational problems and more often than not I find that management simply ignores this data because they don't like what they hear.

To the point Daniel made, getting burned out using Scrum shows there is a problem of too much work being pushed through the team. This is common. It's expected that 'agile' is for the team and the business does not change their bad habits. With that attitude and ignorance to analyzing the whole system, any methodology isn't going to work.</fancy>

The problem is not Agile, Lean or Waterfall. The problem is the general lack of skills, knowledge and professionalism. Anyone with a 3 month programming course calls herself a software engineer. Don't get me wrong there's a lot of talented people out there but not enough. It's a lost battle from the start if you don't have the right people. And chances are you don't.