You may not actually be practicing agile, rather participating in a cargo-cult of agile. Be aware of "magic" rituals versus required activities to keep moving t

You may not actually be practicing agile, rather participating in a cargo-cult of agile. Be aware of "magic" rituals versus required activities to keep moving the project forward. If it's software (w/o a manufacturing aspect) you're probably doing some variant of spiral-based development since software is never done - it's only abandoned. Hybrid-waterfall methodologies do exist, and it's cheaper to write specs and designs than to write and debug code. Use Given-When-Then (GWT) format specs to validate, because "As a birthday gift, I wanna pony" format doesn't verify and validate.