Agile can be this, but it requires finding a company that trusts it's SWE people. Once you have that trust, the rest of it just flows from there. But - it requi

Agile can be this, but it requires finding a company that trusts it's SWE people. Once you have that trust, the rest of it just flows from there. But - it requires everyone to actually be willing to work this way. I work in a company/team that has this, and while we use Jira[0], it's effectively there to remember what we need to do for a given task/bug and ensure that two people don't work on the same thing. The use of Epics lets management & stakeholders see what is happening with a given feature without bugging us. We don't have estimations, retros, or any of the other usual rituals, and it's amazing. If there's a mismatch of expectations or we need to hash something out there's Slack and Zoom. Someone volunteers to write up a card, and we're done. The corollary is that we've had a couple of hires come and go who just did not have the skills and/or interest in being part of those conversations, and they did not last. I'm in two minds if this is the damage inflicted on them by years of managerial Taylorism, or that they just could not keep up with the rest of the team. I expect (but hope to be wrong) that once we expand enough to have actual juniors we might have to embrace some of the more ritual parts of agile. [0] We use Jira in Kanban mode with a couple of text templates for the different card types (epic, story, bug), and none of the usual rules about what can be moved in and out of what column. EDIT: complete->couple