Agile doesn't exist

Why does it feel like agile is so misunderstood? As long as I’ve been in the industry (which I’ll admit is not very long) it has been associated with words like scrum and kanban. It’s obvious to me now that these are distinct concepts. It can be easy, but sloppy, to pin it down as “ensh­ittifica­tion”.

If you’ve ever had to lock-in requirements at the start of the project, or dealt with a quarterly release cycle, or been on a project which drags on so long that you forget why it kicked off in the first place, then as a keen observer you should have reached the same conclusions as the manifesto. What you’re reading is a distillation of a distillation; several software engineers spent years training their judgement by solving specific circumstantial problems until a pattern emerged, then attempted to condense that judgement into a document shorter than a recruiter’s rejection email. That’s why none of this makes sense—standups, story points, sprints, retros, velocity, and even the concept of 1:1s—the users don’t care that you’re “agile”, they want their widgets to work, and you build widgets by leaving devs alone.

You can’t refer to the manifesto or principles in the way you might refer to a user manual. I’m pretty sure nobody is actually “doing” agile. It’s not something you can “do” at all. If you allow yourself to be present—I mean really pay attention to the problems of your org—what truths can you discover? What some refer to as “agile” is just an outcome of taking great care when designing your software and the processes that lead it to production.