The Idea, and the Ceremony

The original statement is four preferences, each valuing one thing over another without discarding the second.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Working software over comprehensive documentation.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

Responding to change over following a plan.

That is it. Everything else — sprints, standups, story points, retrospectives, the certifications — is somebody's implementation of those preferences, and implementations can be good or bad.

Why it existed. The alternative was specifying a system completely up front, building it for a year, and delivering something that answered a question nobody was asking any more. Agile's core claim is that you learn what you are building by building it, so shorten the loop between deciding and finding out.

✦ Most complaints about agile are complaints about a bad implementation

A daily standup that is a status report to a manager is not what a standup is for. Estimates used as deadlines are the specific failure that makes developers hate estimating. A retrospective where nothing changes is a meeting. When something feels like pointless ceremony, the useful question is what it was supposed to achieve and whether anything here achieves it.