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At a developer conference in 2015, Dave Thomas, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, gave a talk titled “Agile Is Dead.”¹ In a 2018 blog post, Ron Jeffries, another Agile Manifesto author, wrote, “Developers should abandon Agile.”² In a 2019 article in Forbes titled “The End of Agile,” tech author Kurt Cagle wrote, “[Agile] had become a religion.”³ A post about the article⁴ in the programmer forum Slashdot received more than 200 comments from software developers, asserting things like “Agile does not always scale well” and “The definitions of ‘agile’ allow for cargo cult implementations.”

Agile has been a subject of ridicule since its beginning. In the early days, there were many people who did not understand Agile and spoke from ignorance; what has changed is that today the criticism often comes from people who do understand Agile methods and have decided that those methods are problematic.

Is Agile actually dead? The statistics say no,⁵ yet something is clearly wrong. Agile—which was sold as the solution for software development's ills—has severe problems. What are those problems, how did they happen, and what can be done about them? And is Agile worth saving?

Most of the discussion in this chapter will be about software. That is because Agile began in the software domain. In later chapters, we will broaden the discussion to product development in general, and to other kinds of human endeavor, since many Agile ideas apply to essentially any group effort.