Agile Projects Have Become Waterfall Projects With Sprints

All the agility has been sucked out of agile projects

Ben "The Hosk" Hosking
ITNEXT
Published in
4 min readAug 17, 2022

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Doing agile is not the same as being agile

Agile projects have become bloated, lazy waterfall projects with two weeks sprints. The waterfall production line approach is suited to projects with known requirements or making widgets.

Currently, agile projects are turds rolled in raisins and called roses. Any developer with half a nose can smell these are not roses and late projects or failed projects waiting to happen.

The Agile manifesto is full of enthusiasm, vibrancy and can do attitude. It empowers small teams to create software with minimal guidance and tells them to go get it.

Agile doesn’t specify exact rules to follow because you were meant to learn and improve as you went and work out the most effective way to work based on feedback. It acknowledges there are no best ways because each project is unique.

Agile promised to deliver software faster and customers to return on investment quicker. When you hype any project mythology up more than a Lady Gaga concert, disappointment is likely in 99 percent of Agile projects.

Agile has turned into a stiff old man

Agile took over the world and become so popular customers demanded agile projects, regardless of whether it was a good choice or they had the right people.

In the book Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility the writers complain projects do Agile instead of being agile. Agile has become a product instead of a mindset.

“It’s agile snake oil, cookie cutter Agile, Agile in a box. Install it and you will be Agile. It’s Agile for Agiles sake.” Sooner Safer Happier

I would say it’s worse; companies and Dev teams want agile delivery that involves product backlogs, sprints, and fixed deadlines/cost. The agility part of agile projects is completely removed.

  • The retrospectives are gone
  • The agility and changing the…

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Technology philosopher | Software dev → Solution architect | Avid reader | Life long learner