Agile

Let’s assume the worst has already happened. Your team is burnt out. The process is bloated. “Agile” is a word people flinch at. The retros are performative, the standups are robotic, and the burndown chart might as well be a mood ring. Good news: you’re not alone. Better news: you don’t have to stay stuck. Step One: Stop Pretending The first fix is brutally simple—stop doing Agile theater. Scrum isn’t working for your team? Stop doing Scrum. The world will not end. The Product Owner will survive. Nobody gets a medal for following the process if the software is garbage and the team hates their job. ...

Agile isn’t your problem. Agile is dead. Long live Agile. Every few years, someone revives the corpse, dresses it up in a new three-letter acronym, and wheels it around the office like it’s going to save your team. Again. This time it’s “SAFe.” Last time it was “Spotify Model.” Before that, it was Scrum with capital-S and a two-day certification course. You sit through the same slides. Someone renames standup to “daily sync.” Jira gets a new plugin. Leadership announces this will bring “clarity and velocity.” ...

I’m back on the market. My contract’s wrapping up, and I’ve started scanning the job boards. There it is again — Release Manager. Right next to it? Scrum Master. And I can’t help but ask: How is this still a thing? We’re nearly a quarter into the 21st century. Agile’s old enough to rent a car. DevOps has a full beard. And yet somehow, we’re still posting job ads for roles that feel like relics from the JIRA waterfall days. ...

Scrum helped leave waterfall behind. Then it got in the way. It’s 9:57 a.m. and I’m watching someone update a Jira ticket to “In Progress” so they have something to say in the stand-up at 10:00. Welcome to Scrum in the enterprise: a play we all agreed to star in, long after the plot stopped making sense. I’m not here to burn Scrum to the ground. It served its purpose—just not the one it thinks it did. It helped kill off waterfall. It gave developers permission to talk to stakeholders more than once a year. And it introduced the radical idea that shipping working software might be more useful than delivering a 40-page Gantt chart with a straight face. ...

Originally published on September 20, 2022 I was lucky. One of my first real gigs was at a startup that actually understood agile—not just the part where you stand around at 9:30 reciting what you did yesterday. No, I mean real agile. The founder believed in it. Not just the words, but the mindset. And in 2007, that made them look a little unhinged. Estimates in points instead of hours? Delivering small, usable increments? Developers writing tests on purpose? Teams interviewing and hiring their own teammates? It was weird. It was new. And it worked. ...

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: Your team rolls into the retro half-distracted You rehash the same pain points you talked about last sprint Someone adds action items that no one will follow up on Two weeks later, nothing has changed Yeah, me too. A friend of mine put it best: “We stopped doing retros. They just turned into venting sessions that created tasks no one followed up on.” ...