The author of the UML tutorial blog has declared that agile is 'the new religion' and that the principles behind the agile manifesto are really The Twelve Commandments of Agile. The blog's author states that he does not necessarily disagree with the principles but believes that agilists treat them as religious dogma. Unfortunately, I think the blog's author is the one who is mistaking principles for dogma.
The first commandment he comments on is the agile principle: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. The blog's author comments:
As someone who's involved in ensuring the enterprise readiness of Borland's software, this is a topic that's near and dear to me. Borland's process is: we give our software to customers each sprint for acceptance testing only, which allows our customers to try out the completed functionality and give us feedback quickly. However, we deliver enterprise-ready releases a only few times a year.
When a customer takes a sprint build of our software, they agree to the following condition: the delivered functionality should be functionally complete, but the software has not yet been subjected to full enterprise testing, and it is therefore not ready for and should not be deployed to production systems.
You may infer from the paragraph above that we don't do enterprise testing in an agile fashion--we save it until the end of a release. That's not accurate. Typically, we perform enterprise testing (at most) one sprint behind the sprint in which functionality is delivered. Then at the end of the release, we have a 'release readiness' sprint in which no new functionality is delivered. One purpose of this sprint is to allow the remaining enterprise testing to be completed.
In this way, we feel we uphold the spirit of this agile principle--deliver frequent, incremental progress--in a way that works for the enterprise software that we develop.