From my perspective, part of the confusion is agile and scrum's contradictory aims. The concept of "MVP" is opposed to the concept of "Agile Project". MVP. I

From my perspective, part of the confusion is agile and scrum's contradictory aims. The concept of "MVP" is opposed to the concept of "Agile Project". MVP. I would argue when you bring up agile, most people are thinking of the allure of a small scrappy startup with 2-pizza size teams who by herculean effort create a Minimum Viable Prototype in record time. Nevermind, the MVP was built with little concern for scalability, security, or enterprise integration. Speed to market is the driving force behind startup culture and trying to grab market share. The idea is that once you get market share and more funding, then you can think of documenting and optimizing your code. Agile Project. In practice, most people are really running "Agile Projects". They invest considerable time upfront to interview, document, and get signoff on project requirements… before they even start coding. Does this sound like waterfall? After they get the requirements, then they develop using scrum practices and ceremonies. (Nitpick, "ceremony" is a terrible word choice as it means those activities have no meat or value [1]). E.g. 18F's Agile based project approach requires "We conduct discovery research before we build anything. Depending on the complexity of your problem space, this can take up to 2 to 3 months." [2] [1] https://turboscrum.com/the-fascinating-origin-of-the-term-scrum-ceremony/ https://turboscrum.com/the-fascinating-origin-of-the-term-sc... [2] https://agile.18f.gov/18f-agile-approach/ https://agile.18f.gov/18f-agile-approach/