Does Agile Lead To Anarchy

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