Agile Bashing Agile

Why keep bashing Agile when it’s your thing?

I keep reading posts and articles about “Agile is dead”, “Stop doing SAFe”, “We quit Scrum and were never happier”, etc. I don’t get it.

First of all, at least half of these posts come from people who are part of the Agile community themselves. Talk about spitting in your own food. And please don’t say, “But I bash SAFe, and SAFe is not really Agile”, or any of that, because to people who have no or little understanding of Agile, it’s all one big pile of sort of the same. If you bash one, you bash all. If you want to make nuances, do that in the confinement of a not-so-public setting where nuances are understood.

Second of all, I honestly think a lot of the talk is BS. BS because it’s just attention seeking — “look at me making bold statements!” Or, BS because it’s simply not true what they say.

I’ve been a Scrum Master / Agile Coach for more than fifteen years now, and I’ve coached at ten different companies as such, in different settings. Some of those with SAFe, some of them coaching only a few Scrum teams, others leading complete Agile Transformations. Not everything was a hundred percent success, of course, but I’ve seen enough successes and failures large and small to be a good judge of what works and what doesn’t.