I've previously felt that becoming agile was taking 'best' practices from all of these books i've read and trying to apply them.

If we use TDD we'll have less defects, if we use planning poker we'll get quicker and better estimates, if we use automated integration scripts we'll have the fastest deploy time.

Maybe those are all true, but as soon as we're doing the 'best' practice that we read in some book, we've stopped caring to improve. _That_ is what agile is all about.

To me, an agile team is a team that is empowered to make changes for the better and is wise enough to keep good metrics to compare themselves now to their previous selves.

If we have 8 defects per iteration and we implement TDD and our defect rate drops to 5 in the first week... it might be working, but don't change anything for a couple weeks... see if it continues to drop or if it pops right back to 8.

If we change how we do estimating, keep track of our velocity and see how/if it changes. Analyze those differences and make tweaks accordingly!

If there is no clear direction for the team... you may be the problem! The team needs to get together and decide what it's going to do. The time for being political and playing mind games is over. Take the reigns of yourself and say what you think needs be done... and then take action.

The point is, if your managers have become hands-off.. and you've been told you're doing scrum,dsdm,fdd,xp,etc... then YOU are in charge of your own development. So step up and help out.

Right now i'm working on how to take good metrics of our team. I'll blog about it soon i hope.