06-21-2026, 10:25 PM
Adding mine: Agile as commonly practised is usually a way to make bad management feel structured.
The original Agile manifesto is twelve principles, none of which require two-week sprints, daily standups, story points, or a Scrum Master role. Those are from Scrum, which became the dominant implementation, and which has a whole certification industry behind it that has a financial interest in its continued use.
The actual valuable parts of Agile - ship working software regularly, get feedback from real users, respond to change instead of following a plan - are often buried under process theatre.
Signs the Agile is cargo-culting: sprint planning takes longer than the sprint output takes to build, story points are used to measure developer performance, the retrospective produces the same action items every two weeks and nothing changes.
The best teams I've worked on had very little process overhead, communicated constantly, shipped small changes often, and talked to users regularly. They called it "just how we work" rather than Agile.
The original Agile manifesto is twelve principles, none of which require two-week sprints, daily standups, story points, or a Scrum Master role. Those are from Scrum, which became the dominant implementation, and which has a whole certification industry behind it that has a financial interest in its continued use.
The actual valuable parts of Agile - ship working software regularly, get feedback from real users, respond to change instead of following a plan - are often buried under process theatre.
Signs the Agile is cargo-culting: sprint planning takes longer than the sprint output takes to build, story points are used to measure developer performance, the retrospective produces the same action items every two weeks and nothing changes.
The best teams I've worked on had very little process overhead, communicated constantly, shipped small changes often, and talked to users regularly. They called it "just how we work" rather than Agile.