Agile has for decades been considered to be the ultimate way of working. This despite all evidence contradict this in recent years when more and more people have started to point out the Emperor is indeed naked. The question is though if this is really Agile that is dying, or is it just the abuse of Agility that people are calling out?

Let us be honest here. The only reason why Agility was actually such a huge success is because traditional ways of working had transformed into horrible mastodon affairs with silos and team isolations, leading to high costs and poor value. Agile was invented as a counter to this dysfunction with smaller teams, fewer silos and faster iterations to quickly align value creation with return of investment.

Then something went terribly wrong.

The vision of collaboration and faster feedback started to become a religion fueled by ad-hoc behavior and childish self-isolations, where developers took on the roles of unicorn saviors. The result, which is evident today, are zealot primadonnas with inflated egos that self-isolate and demand that they have mandate over things that have neither the competence, experience nor inclination to handle professionally.

Quality is suffering and value is poor or even non-existent.

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People have grown tired of the chaos that only the most unstructured minds and the biggest egos thrive in so they are pushing back against Agile in general and Scrum in particular.

But is this really a problem with Agile? Or are we just seeing the same abuse of Agile as we saw in the traditional ways of working 20+ years ago? Is this more of a people problem, perhaps where people, not processes, have taken the Agile vision and turned it into something abusive and ugly?

Scrum was created for small teams, and it was never meant for large projects, but continuous development. Is it really the fault of Scrum that we try to scale something that was never meant to scale, or that collaboration is suffering when Scrum was never designed for collaboration outside the team? Are we just complaining that our tractor is not doing well on the racetrack, when in reality it is our fault for trying to shoehorn in a way of working where it was never intended to work?

Is there still hope for Agile, or is it truly dead so we need to find something new, something tangible, to replace it?

Is Agile really dead?

Personally, I think that Scrum is pretty much dead today. I think people are tired of the dysfunction that has been introduced and the lack of nuance between how to handle large scale investment projects with multiple teams and continuous deliveries with small teams.

I think people will take what they like from Scrum and then add that to whatever new ways of working they will implement.