> The non-agile shops I've worked at operated with project management methodologies that resemble kanban more than waterfall. Maybe I've just got the entirely

> The non-agile shops I've worked at operated with project management methodologies that resemble kanban more than waterfall. Maybe I've just got the entirely wrong conceptualization in my head here, but to me you're comparing apples and oranges. Agile is the idea that "we should be doing small pieces of work, collecting new information, communicating with business and customer stakeholders and integrating it, then tackling our next piece of work". Waterfall is the idea that "we should know everything we're doing up front before we start". These are the two extremes of the same spectrum. Scrum, kanban, reams of paper, and everything else are implementations to turn these philosophies (or places in between them on the spectrum) into actionable processes. To my understanding (and from some brief sanity checks around the internet), kanban _is_ "Agile". If it isn't to you, then what is your understanding of "Agile"? Editing to add: Most of this understanding comes from having worked a lot of places that did waterfall-scrum or waterfall-kanban. You can have as many sprint rituals as you want, but if nobody is assigned any tickets or starts working on projects until you've documented every minute detail from beginning through to release of a full product... you're doing waterfall, not agile.