Agile Didn’t Fail Us — We Failed Agile

Agile started with a good idea.

A big one. A group of software developers got tired of slow, heavy, complicated ways of building software.

They were working with big documents, long timelines, and very little feedback. They would spend months building something, and in the end, the customer would say, “That’s not what I wanted.”

So they wrote a manifesto.

It had four simple values and twelve principles.

It wasn’t a rulebook. It was more like a guide. It said things like “people over process,” “working software over documentation,” “responding to change over following a plan.” The idea was to help teams work better together and make better software.

In the beginning, Agile was light. It was flexible. Teams would sit together, talk often, and deliver software in small parts. They could get feedback quickly. If something was wrong, they changed direction. It worked well. People felt like they had more control. Projects finished faster. The customer was happier.

But then something changed.

Agile became popular. Really popular.

Companies saw it as the new solution for everything.

Big companies wanted to “go Agile” because they heard it was fast and cheap.

Consultants appeared. Certifications appeared. Frameworks appeared. Scrum. SAFe. LeSS. Kanban.

Everyone had their own way of doing Agile, and they were selling it like a product.

The simple idea became a system. Then it became a business. Now, many companies say they are “Agile,” but what they really follow is a long list of rules and meetings.

People don’t work better together. They just follow the process and hope it works.

We took a simple thing and made it complicated again.

Today, in many teams, Agile is just a show.

You have the daily standup, where people repeat “what I did, what I’ll do, and what’s blocking me” like they’re reading from a script.

Nobody’s really listening. The team members are thinking about other tasks. The manager is just waiting to talk. It’s not collaboration. It’s reporting.

Retrospectives are the same. People talk about what went wrong, what can be better. But next sprint, the same problems return. Nobody has time to fix them. The schedule is always full. And anyway, the problems are often bigger than the team can fix. They’re part of the company culture. But Agile can’t fix bad culture. Not by itself.

We also created new roles—Scrum Master, Product Owner. These roles were meant to help the team. But in many companies, they became mini-managers. The Scrum Master is not coding, not testing, not designing. They’re managing Jira boards, booking meetings, and asking why the burndown chart looks sad. They often don’t have the power to make real change. But they still get the blame when things go wrong.

And then there are the metrics.

Agile was supposed to be about feedback and learning. But now it’s about measuring.

How many story points did the team finish? What’s the velocity? Are we improving the burn rate? Managers use these numbers to compare teams or set targets.

But teams are made of people, not robots.

You can’t push them to deliver more and more every sprint without burning them out.

Story points were never meant to be exact. They are relative. They help the team understand the size of the work. But now, they’re treated like hours. Teams are asked to estimate everything. Managers use the numbers to create deadlines. Then people start gaming the system. They overestimate tasks, split tickets in strange ways, or rush work to hit a number. The result? The metrics look good, but the software is worse.

Let’s talk about “working software”

That’s one of Agile’s values. “Working software over comprehensive documentation.”

But now people use it as an excuse. “It works, so ship it.”

Never mind that it’s ugly. Hard to use. Full of tech debt. As long as it runs, it’s good enough.

But good software is more than “it works.”

Good software is clean, clear, tested, and easy to change. “Just working” is the lowest bar, not the goal.

Agile was meant to make better software by helping people work better together.

But in many places, it’s used to go faster. That’s the big mistake. Agile is not speed. It’s learning.

It’s small feedback loops, fast experiments, early warnings.

Speed is just a side effect when learning works. But if you focus only on speed, you lose quality. And once you lose quality, everything slows down.

Another problem is planning.

Agile was supposed to replace long, fixed plans with short, flexible ones. But companies still want control. They want roadmaps for the whole year. They want to know what will be done in Q3 before Q1 even ends. So teams pretend they can see the future.

They fill the backlog with guesses. They try to predict what they’ll finish in three months. But software doesn’t work like that.

Requirements change. Ideas evolve. Priorities shift. That’s the point of Agile: to be ready when things change. But now we use Agile to make long-term commitments, and then we feel bad when we can’t keep them.

We turned Agile into the same waterfall we tried to escape—just with more meetings and sticky notes.

We also lost focus on users. In the Agile Manifesto, one principle says, “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” Not just delivery—valuable delivery.

But many teams now just deliver features. One after another. The Product Owner creates a list, the team builds it.

But nobody stops to ask, “Do users want this? Is it solving a real problem? Did we make things better?”

What Is Agile About?

Agile should be about real feedback from real people. That means showing your work, watching people use it, asking questions, learning what works and what doesn’t. But that takes time. It’s easier to build what’s in the backlog and move to the next thing. So we do that instead.

The truth is, Agile is hard.

It’s not just a method. It’s a mindset.

You have to trust people. Let teams decide how they work. Give them space to learn, to fail, to improve. You have to stop treating software like a factory product. It’s more like research. Or design.

It’s messy, creative, and unpredictable.

But many companies don’t want that. They want control. Predictability. Charts. Reports. So they use the Agile vocabulary, but not the values. They call themselves Agile, but they don’t change how they think.

This is not just sad. It’s dangerous.

Because when Agile fails in these places, they blame the method. “Agile doesn’t work.”

But it’s not Agile that failed. It’s the fake version. The one with meetings, metrics, and Jira boards, but no trust, no reflection, no real change.

That version never had a chance.

So what can we do?

We can start by being honest.

Admit when the process isn’t helping. Stop doing meetings just because the calendar says so. Ask your team: what’s working? What’s not? And really listen.

Kill the fake Agile rituals. Keep the parts that help people talk, learn, and build together.

Don’t worship story points. They’re a tool, not a target.

Don’t try to plan a whole year. Plan small, adjust often.

Talk to users. Show them your work. Ask if it helps. Change it if it doesn’t.

And most of all, remember what Agile was trying to fix. It wasn’t trying to be perfect. It was trying to be better than the old way. It was trying to make work more human, not more efficient.

Maybe we don’t need a new framework. Maybe we just need to go back to the original values. Not as posters on the wall. But as real guides for how we work.

People over process.
Working software over documentation.
Collaboration over contracts.
Responding to change over following a plan.

It’s not magic. It’s not easy.

But it’s worth trying again.

For real, this time.

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