Sure. A lot of "Agile" is actually cargo-cult agile, used as a vehicle for self-promotion: The daily scrum, the sticky-notes or the Jira.board, and all that oth

Sure. A lot of "Agile" is actually cargo-cult agile, used as a vehicle for self-promotion: The daily scrum, the sticky-notes or the Jira.board, and all that other ceremony. Typically retrofitted on top of a defunct process, with separate requirement analysts, "software architects" whatever that means, and a lot of control functions and processes inherited from the manufacturing industry. What makes that work is probably the few people that actually understands software development - typically a low percentage of the massive overhead in a typical business software development center. But you've got to start somewhere. The Agile ceremonies are not bad, but relatively useless if there is no "real Agile" beneath. Unfortunately, they are easy to implement whereas "real" agile is not. And what is "real" agile: The core agile ideas (the manifesto), the focus on flow-control, the incremental analysis-build-analysis cycle, continuous improvement, multi-disciplined teams, knowledge sharing, analysis methods that involves multiple people (like story mapping), empowerment (self governing teams, but also product owners). Perhaps above all, the idea that software development processes should not be defined by business administrators, but instead by people that are actually qualified. I guess it could be labeled as "common sense", but a few things are typically hard to reason about for a lot of people, for instance the flow-control part (such as kanban), as dynamic efficiency is harder to "see" than static efficiency. But getting good at that is actually hard. Adding 1000 fields and workflows to Jira is easy.