Q4 - What has been your least satisfying Agile experience?
Well, just as when it's great fun to have everything firing on all cylinders, it's very frustrating when the team struggles, particularly when you've had the opposite experience. For me, that's usually because people dismiss an idea, like pair programming, without trying it. They just decide that it can't possibly work, and that's all there is to it. Also, because I'm a consultant, some people form this instant dislike of me before I even walk in the door. You've seen the Dilbert cartoons: the consul"tick". That's me. It can be disheartening.
One of the worst moments for me was during the .com crash, shortly after I went independent. Work dried up, so I found a job through a headhunting firm and ended up as an "in-the-trenches" programmer on a web app in bug-fix crunch mode. I ended up getting them to try agile development (after about six months of soul-destroying effort), but it didn't work out. That project taught me the importance of making sure a company is ready for agile before convincing them to try it. In retrospect, I was pretty arrogant in my approach, too. (What can I say--excessive humility has never been my problem.)
I wrote about that experience in my "Change Diary"--on my website at http://jamesshore.com/Change-Diary/. It's one of the most popular pieces on my site.
(There's a silver lining to it all. That company has now switched over to Scrum+XP, at least in part, and they're apparently having success with it.)
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