"Using Agile really doesn't guarantee you any of this. You're still very free to abandon separation of concerns and end up with a tightly coupled mess."
This is what I find usually happens with agile development. The software tends to start out small, but because it's not well thought out and because it tends to be rushed, even the small stuff becomes spaghetti startlingly quickly -- as happened on a current project, where after less than three months, we managed to cram THREE separate object models into a UI with a whopping TWO screens. (Imagine my frustration when what was six lines of code when I last worked on it now had over 500.)
I'm guessing you were modded down for implied snark, but it's well worth asking how a small project becomes a big project with no noticing, or noticing but not taking appropriate action.
It happens to the best of us, the feature creep, the must-haves, the rush to ship. So, does agile actually fail to address this, or is this something subtle that manages to evade detection despite better practices and intents?
but it's well worth asking how a small project becomes a big project with no noticing, or noticing but not taking appropriate action.
Simple, nobody pays you to notice how much of a problem the software that works perfectly has become. They pay you to improve feature x by a very small amount, or to add feature y.
So, sure Agile works fine, in the same world that most every other methodology works fine.
It's not the methodology that makes good software, it's the people behind it.
No, that's the sad part. But when you have 10 people tromping around the same code in a hurry it's hard to keep things clean and consistent even with code reviews... and there's been such a push for new stuff that there hasn't been time for refactoring.
This is what I find usually happens with agile development. The software tends to start out small, but because it's not well thought out and because it tends to be rushed, even the small stuff becomes spaghetti startlingly quickly -- as happened on a current project, where after less than three months, we managed to cram THREE separate object models into a UI with a whopping TWO screens. (Imagine my frustration when what was six lines of code when I last worked on it now had over 500.)