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O.K., all this activity on Agile in this section all of a sudden, has made me take another look and I'll tell you, I'm already totally confused (once again). Agile, Lean, Kanban, XP, Scrum,... alphabet soup. Which one do I use when? How can I determine which one of these methods (and others I didn't mention) apply to my project?

I mean, if I can't off the starting line by being able to select one of all these Agile techniques, how can I ever buy into it?

Doing eXtreme Programming (XP) is probably the easier one and should be adopted for many software development projects. There are a lot of techniques in XP that make it very useful for software. The question usually comes to selecting between Scrum and Kanban and what usually happens is people opt to use Scrumban, which is a combination of both. The rule of thumb is that if the projects are strategic and have deadlines or specific scope, and something is coming up within the next few months, and a specific product owner needs to get something by the end of that period, and you know they are looking for those fixed time boxes (sprints), then Scrum would be the preferred option, since it gives you that high level of visibility and tracking towards a specific goal. Kanban is more suited to operational ehancement projects, not necessarily the big strategic projects, because of its nature.

Is there a "method" one can use to determine which approach to use? A lot (most) of the write ups I see about using the agile process are very general and don't give specific deterministic steps to use to come up with what method to use. I was hoping there is such a method out there and someone would post it here.