Does the adoption of AgileSoftwareDevelopment lead to anarchy. Is this a bad thing? If so, then what are the rules or practices that would prevent this? ''Anarchy can be used as medicine against dogmatism and sluggish thinking. I suspect it is a medicine you can overdose on. I think that AgileMethods strike a good balance. They don't dismiss procedure and method, neither do they let any particular method dominate: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".'' http://swt-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/publications/files/anarchy.pdf - Making Use of Anarchy in Systems Development "bad thing" => No. Anarchy (ie. LibertarianSocialism, ParticipatoryDemocracy etc.) is a GoodThing. Especially OpenSourceAnarchy, which seems to work pretty well: http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_article/_a000010-001239.htm ---- ScrumProcess holds as a tenet that there is an EdgeOfChaos at which it is possible to have a complex but still adaptive project. Agile methods supposedly allow you to operate in this region, or to 'push' the edge of chaos (presumably this puts you at a competitive advantage versus other companies that couldn't push it as far). Compare this with the aviation expression PushingTheEnvelope. ---- For me the essence of AgileMethods is feedback to improve the process, together with a determination to make sure each constraint can always be justified. There's a big difference between adaptability and anarchy. Anarchy in software development, to me, is CowboyCoding, and is something I'd always fight against. ---- Agile devlopment leads to anarchy if you think that anarchy is the only alternative to monarchy (or dictatorship). ---- See MethodologicalPluralism, NoProcess