I've come to dread any formalization of Agile. Agile development is fine. I've built a 40+ engineering team with it. I can vouch for its effectiveness when applied to small, excellent teams.
For reference, here's all the Agile you need, it's 4 sentences:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
The real problem is that capital-A Agile is not agile at all, but exactly the opposite: A fat process that enforces following a plan (regular, rigid meeting structure), creating comprehensive documentation (user stories, specs, mocks, task board) and contract negotiation (estimation meetings, planning poker). It's a bastardization of the original idea, born by process first people who tried to copy the methods of successful teams without understanding them.
For reference, here's all the Agile you need, it's 4 sentences:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
The real problem is that capital-A Agile is not agile at all, but exactly the opposite: A fat process that enforces following a plan (regular, rigid meeting structure), creating comprehensive documentation (user stories, specs, mocks, task board) and contract negotiation (estimation meetings, planning poker). It's a bastardization of the original idea, born by process first people who tried to copy the methods of successful teams without understanding them.