Are you truly agile?

The current state of the agile methodology in software development reminds me of the Chinese whisper game.

The Chinese whisper game, also known as telephone or whisper down the lane, is a communication game where participants sit in a line or a circle. The first person whispers a message to the next, who then passes it along to the subsequent participants. The last person says the message out loud, and often, the final message differs significantly from the original, highlighting how information can be distorted through the process of passing it along in a chain.

Like this game, the actual message from the first group of people is simple and straightforward.

Unfortunately, we lost this core message in reality.

Now, if we ask people what agile is, we get answers like - running a backlog "grooming" at the beginning of a "sprint," providing "estimates" for the "JIRA issues," then running a "standup" daily, and finally doing "retrospective" after the end of the sprint.

Some people may argue that isn't it agile. I empathize with them. They are right because that's the message they received from the previous person. But just like the Chinese whisper game, the real meaning of "agile" got lost in the process.

This blog post aims to bring back the awareness of the "first message" of what agile is.

I want you to immerse yourself and internalize what is mentioned on this page about the principles of the agile methodology.