Agile Projects in the real world

It's been a while since I've written a post, but this topic has been on my mind for a while. I've always been in favor of Agile project delivery, the Simplicity and "you are not going to need it" principals. I've seen it time and time again, that projects are overarchitected, overdesigned and are overpromissed. Teams spend months upon months on design meetings, requirements gathering, architecture comeeties. Then before the project is even close to the stable beta stage, multiple things happen:

• A key developer leaves and developers who were not 100% sold on the design start picking parts of the projects to rearchitect
• A new technology is introduced in the market that makes a lot of work already done on the project absolute
• The customer (or business sponsor) changes his mind on the need for the project in the first place because the timeframe for the key deliverable was missed.

The article in the computerworld reflects on these issues, and I found it to be very comforting that I am not the only one thinking about this. http://www.computerworld.com/ managementtopics/management/story/ 0,10801,110951,00.html