Agile fatigue is rising

A lot of articles are written these past few months (writing this 17.10.2022) about agile claiming it doesn't work.

I kind of see the point, but I don't see the reflection is correct.

Agile, scrum, extreme programming are just principles. They guide you but they shouldn't be written in stone rules that stop you and don't have exceptions.

Every process needs to be finetuned to the specific team and project.

Thing is, people are quick to do premature optimisation (also known as the root of all evil) before gathering evidence.

In layman terms - start by implementing the process and then gather feedback and adjust it.

Scrum has that in the form of a sprint retrospective.

So, the theory is there, but why the frustration ?

Bellow is an unstructured list of painpoints:

• Too many meetings and ceremonies. Typically 10-20% of the sprint is in ceremonies (if it is 2 weeks, 4 hours worth of dailies, 2-3 hours worth of refinements, 30 minutes retro, 1-2 hours review, 2-4 hours planning

• The meetings don't guarantee success and often times people need to spend the same amount of time in preperation if they are to be successful. If only during refinements you start thinking about a task you won't refine anything

• Agile coaches too often focus on the principles and not on helping the team. They introduce a lot of distractions and extra meetings where as providing a questionable amount of value. I've seen agile coaches work good if they work with the manger more than the team.

• Some years have passed so agile isn't shiny and new, therefore the "wilingness to try" is not there as much as it was

Is agile dead ? No.

Is something new going to start gaining traction ? In some time yes.

Will we discover something better ? No, just something that solves some of the problems mentioned above at the cost of intriducing new ones which we have to discover.