“Dark Agile” discussion with Agile Austin

Back in 2022, I did a presentation at a conference that I called “Losing My Religion”. It was about how the Agile methodology has turned into a cult and looks nothing like what the original developers who created it envisioned. It was funny and irreverent. I talked about how I was repositioning my team from being embedded in agile to being “agile-adjacent”, the superfluous roles, the fact that enterprises want the flexibility of agile but with the rigidity and planning-centric approach of waterfall. I went hard.

Little did I know that the head of Austin Agile was in the back of the room, listening to every word! That’s Max Ekes. And to his credit, he came up afterwards and we had a great talk. He was curious to learn more about my point of view. Of course, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard these type of critiques. But there was something in the way I was talking about it that was engaging to him.

So Max invited me to be the guest speaker at their monthly meetup. Here’s a recording of the session. It was fun talking with that group and discovering that they share a lot of the same concerns.

Thanks, Max!