The Paradox that is Agile

If you are following Agile to the letter, you are probably not following agile

So, Agile as a software development methodology has been around for a long time. Long enough for a lot of people in the software industry to know about it, follow it and to eventually abuse the spirit of it.

I’ve been seeing almost every team now-a-days trying to follow Agile in their projects. And I’ve seen people slacking away and not at all being able to follow some of it’s guidelines and I’ve seen a few of them being pretty strict with what agile has to say about software development practices.

So, the teams who actually slack away on agile methodologise and still claim to follow agile are the better ones out of two. Because I believe deep down they know that they are not agile.

The real problem is with teams who “claim” to be following agile by the book.

We can call them the Agile Fanatics, but this term itself would be an oxymoron (right?).

This isn’t a blog post about re-iterating the agile manifesto. It’s about re-iterating the fact that the guidelines in the agile manifesto are exactly that – “guidelines”.

So the next time you see your scrum master, manager, lead or even your colleague reading out the agile guideline(s) to you as if it were a rule and if you seriously think that it’s counter-productive for your team, please try to explain her/him that :

“If you are following agile to the letter, then you are probably not following agile”.