Agile Methodolgy

The open source technology especially in Java community has many new things to learn or adapt every day doubtlessly.
In these days I am looking forward to compare my experience in Agile methodologies like Scrum with other ones to adjust myself and learn more. Moreever I am interested in knowing more about Agile best practices and their accomplishment obstacles.And here this question brings to mind:
Why Agile methodology fails?
How to build an Agile team and what is its prerequisites?
When can we assert that a team is working in Agile way?
What is the cost of switching to Agile and when is it cost-beneficent?
What is the exact meaning of " our team works with Scrum methodology"?
and many other questions............


I approximately have a 15 months experience in Scrum and have read many posts and books about it but I think in practice building an Agile team is very difficult than it seems at first glance. Comparing Agile with traditional methodologies ( I don't distinguish between words process and methodology in this post since it is not my concern here and I treat them in a same way (;- ) theoretically reveals that Agile based working is simple and easy to do but practically it is wrong. I think what makes Agile difficult to apply is its main philosophy: Agile is people oriented and traditional methods are process oriented and it is clear that working with peoples is the big concern of management during its whole life. Most of teams who switch to Agile think that bringing some terminologies ( such as Agile, XP, best pracrice, TDD, Continuous Integration, Daily scrum, burning chart and so on) and some technologies (such as Jira, Wiki, CI server, and etc) make their team Agile and here is the problem occurs. I think Agile is thought that should be injected to team members and believed by whole team not a determined framework for doing task.

Forcing team members to behave in a determined and specified framework as it is done in process-oriented methodologies is very simple than changing the way team thinks!. The former only changes the way people work but the later directly involved with thoughts of people and it is hard to change them. This is the reason why Agilitians strongly emphasize that employ Agile method in a team with committed people not involved.

In the next post I will define the Agile and its best practices. Then in different posts for each practice I'll talk scrutinizingly.