Start with the problem, not the framework
Ask: what hurts today? Long lead times? Poor quality? No feedback? Pick the practice to fit the problem, not the other way round.
Why this site exists
Agile was meant to free us from bureaucracy. It became it.
A decade and a half ago, Agile was a revolution — a retreat from rigid, bureaucratic Waterfall. Today, in many companies, it stands for the very thing it was meant to protect us from: endless stand-ups, pointless ceremonies and reporting for the sake of reporting. This site is a reminder of what Agile was meant to be.
Waterfall was associated with an approach where you spend months writing a specification, then months building it, only to find out at the end that the customer needed something else. Lots of documents, lots of signatures, very little conversation.
Agile was the practitioners’ answer: less process, more conversation; fewer year-long plans, more working product every few weeks. It worked — and that’s exactly why everyone started copying it.
The problem is that people copied the form, not the substance. Meetings, boards, roles and certificates can be rolled out by decree. Trust, autonomy and curiosity can’t. Over time, form ate substance. In many organizations Agile became the new Waterfall: a different vocabulary, but the same control, the same reports and the same lack of contact with the customer.
Agile didn’t fail. The misunderstanding of Agile failed — along with the industry that made money from that misunderstanding.
This site grew out of my article “Make Agile Great Again” from December 2024 — about how a revolutionary idea became the very thing it fought against.
Today many people turn away from Agile because they associate it with what was done to it. I get it. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater means going back to the problems Agile once solved. That’s why this site exists: to separate the values from the rituals.
Timeline
From the manifesto to the “Agile Industrial Complex”
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2001
A practitioners’ rebellion
Seventeen people who write code and lead teams say “enough” to heavyweight processes. The manifesto fits on a single page.
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2005–2012
The boom
Scrum and Agile go mainstream. Small teams’ successes catch the eye of executives. Training courses, conferences and certificates follow.
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2010s
The certification industry
Two-day courses hand out “master” titles. Agile becomes a product to sell — with licences, consultants and “transformations” measured in months.
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2011+
Scaling
Large organizations want Agile “at enterprise scale”. Scaling frameworks add layers of roles, artifacts and meetings. For many teams it’s top-down control returning under a new name.
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2014
“Agile is Dead”
Dave Thomas, one of the signatories, writes that the word “agile” has been hijacked by marketing. He suggests talking about “agility” — a skill, not a product.
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2016
Dark Scrum
Ron Jeffries describes “Dark Scrum”: Scrum used as a pressure tool. People held to account daily, commitments forced by managers, no trust.
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2018
Agile Industrial Complex
Martin Fowler talks about the “Agile Industrial Complex” — process once again imposed on teams from outside. Jeffries publishes “Developers Should Abandon Agile”.
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2020s
The retreat
Companies cut Scrum Master and agile coach roles. In corporations “agile” stands for bureaucracy, meetings and Jira. The pendulum swings back — often toward control and annual plans.
Comparison
The manifesto vs. the corporate version
Click a card to see how each value got turned upside down.
Self-diagnosis
The Agile cargo-cult test
Tick what you see in your team or organization. Be honest — nobody’s watching, and your answers stay in your browser.
Your score
0
/ 12
Tick the symptoms
Your result will appear once you tick something.
Getting back to the roots
Six steps, no certificate required
Measure outcomes, not activity
Time from idea to production, deployment frequency, user satisfaction. Not story points or the number of meetings.
Cut half the meetings
Every event must change some decision. If it changes nothing — shorten it, change it or drop it. Let the team decide.
Invest in technical excellence
Automated tests, CI/CD, refactoring. Without them short iterations are impossible and “agile” lives only in the calendar.
Give decisions to those who have the knowledge
The team decides how, the Product Owner decides what and in which order. Managers create the conditions — they don’t micromanage.
Read the manifesto again
One page: four values and twelve principles. Most of today’s arguments about Agile resolve themselves once we go back to that text.
Agile isn’t dead. It was misunderstood.
On the blog I write about what I’ve seen in teams and organizations — what works, what doesn’t, and why.