Agile: A Manifesto Abandoned
Once upon a time, “Agile” was a revolution. It was a rallying cry against rigid processes and the bureaucratic nightmare of waterfall planning. The Agile Manifesto’s authors envisioned a world where collaboration, flexibility, and rapid iteration created real value.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and those same authors are busy distancing themselves from the Frankenstein their creation has become. Jon Kern? He’s even Reimagining Agile entirely, likely as a form of protest. And then there’s SAFe—a framework so bloated and misguided it makes waterfall look lean.
SAFe has taken “Agile” to its logical, horrifying extreme: a labyrinth of roles, certifications, and processes that somehow manage to be both paralyzing and pointless.
SAFe: Scientology for Middle Managers
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the sheer absurdity of SAFe. It’s not just a framework—it’s a full-blown cult. Year after year, your organization must recertify itself in increasingly stupid roles within the Church of SAFe. Congratulations, you’re now an Advanced Portfolio Agilist or a Certified SAFe Release Train Engineer! What does that mean? Who cares—it looks great on LinkedIn.
And what do you actually get for your trouble?
- PI Planning: Where entire teams stop working for days to draw up overly optimistic goals everyone knows will change within a week.
- PI Goals: A magical shield teams use to avoid accountability. “Sorry, that’s not in our PI goals!”
- Middle Managers with Certifications: Who now have a perfect excuse to waste time in meetings, talks, and workshops while adding zero value to the project.
It’s a business model ripped straight from Scientology. Pay more money, climb the ladder of Agile enlightenment, and never stop recertifying—or questioning why you’re doing this in the first place.
The Agile Cult: A Ritual for Every Hour
Every project I’ve worked on for the past decade introduces Agile the same way: by adding ceremonies to your calendar. A ton of recurring ceremonies. Apparently, the best way to deliver value is to ensure you never have time to do any actual work.
- Daily standups: As if Scrum invented morning meetings.
- Reviews: Where you demo something the business doesn’t understand, because your Scrum Master (project manager) demands it no matter if any tangible feedback can be obtained showcasing your refactored SOAP header
- Retrospectives: A ritualistic exercise in futility, where teams learn to stop suggesting changes because nothing ever gets fixed.
And SAFe just adds fuel to this dumpster fire. Now, in addition to daily rituals, you get quarterly planning events, redundant roles, and endless frameworks designed to make sure every ounce of creativity and productivity is squeezed out of your teams. The original 12 principles behind the manifesto are so sound and logical, that they would never be considered in modern organizations. Imagine the roles of Enterprise Architects in a universe where self-organizing teams are responsible and trusted to come up with the best architectures. Imagine always opting for simplicity and early and continuous deliveries of valuable software. That we focus on keeping the people building software happy instead of bogging them down with ungodly amounts of sour-work and processes.
DevOps: A Cultural Shift, Not a Job Title
If Agile’s been turned into a bloated parody, DevOps is its unfortunate sidekick. What started as a cultural shift—breaking silos and increasing collaboration between development and operations—has been reduced to little more than a buzzword slapped onto rebranded sysadmin job descriptions.
- “DevOps Engineer”: A fancy title for someone maintaining CI/CD pipelines and patching servers.
- “DevOps Team”: A new silo created to replace the old silos.
- “DevOps Department”: Wait, what?
The irony is palpable. DevOps wasn’t supposed to be about creating new departments or job titles—it was about breaking down barriers and fostering shared responsibility. Instead, it’s become a checkbox for HR to tick off during hiring and a convenient label for middle managers who don’t understand its original purpose.
Here’s a thought: instead of forming a DevOps Department, try actually collaborating across teams. Radical, I know.
Certifications: Agile’s New Bureaucracy
Agile was supposed to be an antidote to bureaucracy, but now it has its own flavor. To prove you’re “Agile,” you need certifications—lots of them. Scrum Master? Take a course. Product Owner? That’s another certification. SAFe? Prepare to sell your soul.
The irony is staggering. The Manifesto fought against rigid processes, and now Agile is the process. A waterfall of certifications and gates designed to prove you’re “Agile enough” to attend the next sprint planning.
Agile Theater: Pretend to Give a F***
The Agile cult doesn’t just waste your time—it demands your compliance. Show up to the ceremonies, recite the mantras, and pretend to give a damn. Demo your SOAP service to a business that doesn’t understand what it does. Nod along during the retro as someone suggests “better communication” for the 37th sprint in a row.
Here’s the secret: no one cares. The business doesn’t care. The team doesn’t care. Everyone’s just going through the motions because the system demands it.
The Most Agile Project I’ve Worked On
You know what the most Agile project I’ve worked on in the past decade looked like?
- Two meetings a week.
- Shared Kanban board and backlog.
- Sitting next to each other 2-3 days a week.
- Trust.
That’s it. No daily standups. No retros where we tried to move mountains with Post-it notes. Just a shared understanding of the goal, trust in each other to deliver, and a commitment to fixing problems when they arose. The result? We delivered faster and with more value than any over-ceremonied, certification-laden “Agile” project I’ve been part of.
A Final Thought: Agile Is Dead, Long Live Agility
The word “Agile” has been beaten to death by middle managers and shamanistic SAFe rituals. But the principles of agility—the ability to adapt, collaborate, and deliver value quickly—are more relevant than ever.
It’s time to strip away the ceremonies for the sake of ceremonies, the certifications, and the performative nonsense. Let’s go back to what Agile was meant to be: a mindset, not a calendar full of rituals.
Because the most Agile thing you can do isn’t passing a certification or holding a standup. It’s trusting your team to solve problems and giving them the space to do it.