At conferences (and when talking to others), I often hear discussions about specific agile methodologies.

About the relative merits of extreme programming vs Srcum. About how SAFe is not actually agile (or why it is agile). About whether Kanban is agile or lean or both or none of the above.

About how Sprints and standup meetings and the Scrum Master role and the backlog and other things cause problems and are responsible for dysfuntions. Or about how those things work really well when you use them as intended.

And all of those discussions have some merit. Just… I think sometimes, it would be necessary to take two steps back and reconsider why we are doing this in the first place - and what we expect to happen.

Here are some of my thoughts around this topic: