I was just reading Better Software’s latest edition. In a fantastic article Clinton Keith and Mike Cohn describe guidelines on how to fail an agile project (with style!). Based on earlier posts it is quite obvious that my favourite is #9:

Merrilynn was able to use this guideline to kill her company’s pilot agile project. […]

Another option open to Merrilynn was putting all twenty of her people on one team. This would have violated the standard agile advice of creating teams of five to nine people. She could have justified it to anyone who questioned the decision by stressing the unique two-client nature of her team’s product. If she had chosen to create one large team instead of three reasonably sized teams, Merrilynn would have substantially increased the communication overhead of her team. This would have slowed progress and created complaints about how all the conversations in agile were a tremendous burden. If separating teams is too hard to justify, you can bog down a project very easily by following guideline 9.

Guideline 9: Large projects need large teams. Ignore studies that show productivity decreases with large teams due to increased communication overhead. Since everyone needs to know everything, invite all fifty people to the daily standup.