Agile has failed

In 2001, a group of seventeen software practitioners published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, a concise document that emphasized "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and "working software over comprehensive documentation."

Agile was supposed to be a revolution, a rejection of rigid, top-down planning in favor of adaptability, collaboration, and delivering value quickly.

Yet, two decades later, "Agile" has mutated into something almost unrecognizable. For many teams, it has become a rigid system of ceremonies, that mirror the very bureaucratic heaviness it set out to replace. In practice, Agile in most organizations looks like waterfall project management, just broken into smaller increments, with more meetings along the way.

Of course, defenders will argue "That's not Agile, that's Scrum" or "Kanban is different." And yes, technically, Agile is a set of principles, while Scrum and Kanban are frameworks. But in reality, most companies don't practice Agile principles at all, they adopt Scrum by the book or use Kanban boards as glorified task trackers. Scrum, with its ceremonies and roles, has become the de facto corporate "Agile," and in many places, it enforces rigidity instead of adaptability. Kanban, meanwhile, often degenerates into endless to-do columns that optimize for metrics rather than value delivery. Both frameworks are routinely weaponized by management as control mechanisms rather than as tools of empowerment.

The end result is that the spirit of Agile, lightweight, adaptive, human centered gets lost in favor of framework dogma. The frameworks are too often applied in ways that betray the manifesto they were supposed to serve.

This essay argues that Agile, as practiced in industry today, has failed. It has been corrupted into meaningless rituals that undermine its original principles, and many teams would be better off abandoning ceremonies in favor of simpler, principle-driven ways of working.

The Agile Manifesto articulated four core values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Supporting these values were twelve principles, including delivering software frequently, welcoming changing requirements, and prioritizing simplicity. Crucially, Agile was never meant to prescribe rigid processes. It was meant to liberate teams from over-engineered project management and focus them on value delivery.

The irony is that what organizations now call "Agile" often violates these values outright. Instead of enabling flexibility, Agile has become a new orthodoxy, filled with certifications, frameworks, and mandatory rituals that elevate process above outcome.

One of the clearest signs of Agile's corruption is the obsession with ceremonies. The clearest sign of failure isn't that it doesn't work, it's that it became the exact bureaucratic nightmare it was created to escape. In theory, meetings like standups or retrospectives are lightweight touchpoints for alignment and improvement. In practice, they have become bureaucratic checkpoints.

Standups were supposed to be quick sync-ups between teammates. Instead, they're performative status reports where developers target are managers. "Yesterday I worked on the thing, today I'll work on the thing, no blockers."

The real conversations the ones that actually unblock work, happen in DMs and side channels because nobody wants to admit confusion or failure in front of management. We've created a ritual where lying by omission is the optimal strategy.

Story points might be greatest con. We spend hours debating whether something is a 3 or a 5, as if these numbers mean anything beyond "the last time we argued about this, we called it a 3."

Story points exist primarily to give management the illusion of predictability. They want velocity charts and burn-down rates, so we give them fiction dressed as data. A senior engineer's "3" is different from a junior's "3," yesterday's "5" isn't today's "5," and none of it correlates to actual business value delivered.

Meanwhile, no customer ever said, "I'm so glad this feature took exactly 8 story points."

I've not seen any retrospectives in my life that changed actual thing. Most of the time there are two or three people who debates about the thing which they had whole sprint in the mind and can't talk about loudly, other team just don't care and they want it to be finished as soon as possible, if you will have argument about agile processes, trust it will not be fixed any soon and most of time they will say that problem is you, so to prepare for that, u need to read whole agile manifesto and talk with them in their own language, otherwise you don't have chance to win.

Teams end up spending more time in ceremonies than writing code or talking to users to get fast feedback. Agile, which was meant to strip away unnecessary process, has ironically re-introduced it under a different name.

One of the Agile Manifesto's principles states:

"Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done."

This principle is striking because most of the heavy ceremony and strict bureaucracy found in modern Agile exists precisely because organizations do not trust engineers.

If a company feels compelled to enforce endless process because it cannot trust its own engineers, the problem is not the methodology, it is a failure of hiring and leadership. Hiring managers who bring in people they do not trust, or who create environments where engineers are treated as replaceable resources instead of motivated individuals, are already violating Agile's foundation. The Manifesto does not prescribe micromanagement, it prescribes trust and empowerment. Without this, no number of ceremonies will make a team truly Agile.

If Agile has failed in practice, what should teams do? The answer is not to replace Agile with yet another branded methodology (Scaled Agile, SAFe, LeSS, etc.), but to return to first principles.

Work directly with users. The Agile Manifesto reminds us that working software and customer collaboration matter most. Many teams would benefit more from shipping small features frequently and talking directly to users than from estimating story points.

Cut the ceremonies. Most meetings add little value. Asynchronous updates, shared dashboards, and real-time collaboration tools can replace standups and status meetings.

Focus on outcomes, not velocity. Success should be measured by customer value and software quality, not by the number of story points completed in a sprint.

Empower small, autonomous teams. True agility comes from minimizing dependencies and bureaucracy, not from following a rigid playbook.

Paradoxically, abandoning "Agile" as a formalized process may be the only way to actually practice agility as visioned in 2001.

Agile started as four developers saying "this is bullshit" to the entire software industry. They were right. Twenty years later, Agile itself became the bullshit.

The original manifesto was 68 words. The Scrum Guide is now 14 pages. SAFe documentation runs hundreds of pages. We buried simplicity under process, and then hired consultants to explain the process we created to avoid consultants.

Agile only works with trust, and most companies have none.

Every Agile ceremony is actually a trust substitute

Standups exist because managers don't trust developers to communicate

Story points exist because executives don't trust teams to estimate

Sprint commitments exist because nobody trusts anybody to do what they say

Retrospectives exist because we don't trust teams to improve naturally

We've built an entire framework around the assumption that engineers are lazy, incompetent children who need constant supervision. Then we wonder why it doesn't work. As en engineer if you will work a lot like that, it will be your professional suicide.

The moment you measure velocity, you've already lost. Teams learn to game the system, inflating estimates, splitting stories unnecessarily, carrying hidden buffers. Why? Because when velocity becomes a performance metric, delivering value becomes secondary to hitting numbers.

Agile certification is a $100 billion industry. Let that sink in. We're spending more on teaching people how to manage work than on actually doing work.

Every failed Agile transformation follows the same pattern:

Company hires expensive consultants

Consultants implement their trademarked framework

Teams suffocate under new processes

Productivity drops

Consultants blame the teams for "not being Agile enough"

Company hires more consultants

It's a perfect scam. When Agile fails, the solution is always more Agile.

The Agile Manifesto mentions customers. Modern Agile mentions product owners, middlemen who've never met a real customer. We replaced direct feedback with telephone games through layers of interpretation.

Ask your team when did you last talk to an actual user? Not a product owner, not a stakeholder, not a business analyst. A real person who uses your software. The silence will tell you everything.

The best teams I've seen don't do Agile. They just build software. They talk when they need to talk. They plan when they need to plan. They change when they need to change.

Can a developer push to production today based on user feedback from this morning? Without a ticket, without approval, without a sprint planning session?

If the answer is no, you're not Agile.

Agile didn't fail because it was wrong. It failed because it was right about something companies can't accept, that small teams of motivated people, given trust and direct customer contact, will outperform any process.

But trust doesn't scale. Control does. So we chose control and called it Agile.

Until companies are willing to actually trust their engineers, not pretend to trust them while monitoring every metric, Agile will remain what it's become.

The manifesto authors gave us a philosophy. We turned it into a religion. And like most religions, we kept the rituals but lost the meaning.