In an increasingly ironic way "Agile" manifestations generally bear little resemblance to that manifesto.
The first and most obvious failure is that most consultants sell a process and offer little to improve the "individuals and interactions" part. In fact to the contrary I find these contractors spend a lot of effort making "Agile" palatable to managers and upper management. They try to create tons of layers of bullshit metrics for them to be happy (or unhappy) about. Instead of fixing dysfunctional management and team structures they reinforce them. The roles have new names but everyone just falls back into their old behaviours. Nothing really changes we just have new meetings and new buzzwords.
But that’s not a problem with the agile approach itself, is it? Unless you would try to argument (as the OP does) that there is no way to do agile right. Which sounds like a lunacy to me, given that the manifesto basically says to stop doing cargo cult management, stop following meaningless rituals, stop ignoring problems and start using common sense. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle.
It's a problem inherent in all ideologies. Agile is an ideology and it would take a cognitive leap of epic proportions to deny that.
Agile is like communism in that way. On paper, it's great! In real life, everyone is miserable and everything is falling to bits and there's some other guy enjoying the fruits of your labour.
There is no "right" way. There is what we did and the results: successes and failures. How teams respond to these outcomes seems to come almost entirely down to leadership and the team and have little to do with "agile" or not.
Too many people try to attribute the principles of the agile manifesto to the practices of "Agile". I don't see the relationship most of the time.
There is what we did and the results: successes and failures.
I’d consider that OK, it’s how software development works. I don’t have that much experience to make general judgements, but in my opinion agile does not try to offer you a recipe for a successful software project. Because such recipe simply does not exist. Agile just tries to guide you away from some obvious and tried wrong turns (like relying on processes too much). The rest is up to your team and your customer, and there are bound to be both successes and failures.
I used to defend "Agile" against the "haters" in much the same way. As I gained more experience I began to see that most of what people claim is "Agile" is just prescribed processes trying to hitch themselves to the manifesto and the community it started. They have little bearing on what is or isn't agile though.
Scrum is scrum, if you like it fine, I don't. XP is XP, and so on. Each does in fact try to offer up a recipe for successful software projects. But there is no such thing as an "Agile" process. So, try to embody the principles and it may help you to be a better, smarter software developer, but even if you do it may be of little to help to cure a dysfunctional team or business.
The first and most obvious failure is that most consultants sell a process and offer little to improve the "individuals and interactions" part. In fact to the contrary I find these contractors spend a lot of effort making "Agile" palatable to managers and upper management. They try to create tons of layers of bullshit metrics for them to be happy (or unhappy) about. Instead of fixing dysfunctional management and team structures they reinforce them. The roles have new names but everyone just falls back into their old behaviours. Nothing really changes we just have new meetings and new buzzwords.