Agile is people, the rest is commentary
Well in addition to the four values there are also 12 principles of the agile manifesto. And agile leaves plenty of room to deal with the issues mentioned.<p>The actual problem with agile, as I’ve seen first hand, is that teams adopt Scrum as if it’s some Agile Silver Bullet. If you just do what you’re told by the CSM, then projects will go better. This is especially true when there is a power imbalance, developer problems are swept under the carpet, and retros are discouraged or non existent.<p>It’s nonsense. Like all practices, there are all sorts of problems intrinsic to Scrum that need to be considered carefully and resolved.<p>How do you manage a large backlog?<p>How do you deal with unexpected complexity discovered at the very start of a sprint?<p>Where are the overall project goals documented - and how do we measure against them?<p>This is not to say that these problems can’t be dealt with in scrum. The Agile Manifesto leaves plenty of room for resolving them, but Scrum is being taught by many as the One True Way, and if you dare suggest changes or deficiencies in the process then you just Don’t Get It.<p>It’s the rigidity of these practices that has become the problem - the way I’ve seen Scrum implemented in several large projects is effectively waterfall with a scrum veneer.<p>When you’ve been shipping software for more than the length of your adult life, it gets tiresome to have someone with a dodgy certification in agile project management explain how to ship.