25 years after the Agile, did the industry help or hurt software development?
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It comes down to trust. There are ways to protect your own integrity and equanimity in a low-trust environment but most people will suffer in that kind of situation.
Before agile you could “kick the can down the road” for six months before the senior people realize what they wouldn’t hear from the new guy on the project: nobody knows how to make a production build! Until then though life can be cozy on a day to day basis. In agile on the other hand, you have nerve-wracking meetings every day but somehow it never gets out that the engineering manager has no idea how long it takes to build the product or that the code violates all the rules [1] laid down by that engineering manager despite that engineering manager asserting that “we do code reviews”
[1] reasonable if not inspired
Before agile you could “kick the can down the road” for six months before the senior people realize what they wouldn’t hear from the new guy on the project: nobody knows how to make a production build! Until then though life can be cozy on a day to day basis. In agile on the other hand, you have nerve-wracking meetings every day but somehow it never gets out that the engineering manager has no idea how long it takes to build the product or that the code violates all the rules [1] laid down by that engineering manager despite that engineering manager asserting that “we do code reviews”
[1] reasonable if not inspired
My LinkedIn feed was flooded with anniversary posts from people who built the Agile industry — co-founders of the Scrum Alliance, the CEO of PMI, certified coaches, SAFe practitioners. The pattern across almost every post was striking: they acknowledge what went wrong, then continue doing the thing they just criticized. Direct quotes from today's posts by certified Agile professionals:
"We turned agile into a certification ladder" "Ceremony without intent" "Packaged mediocrity" One person called it "the unforgivable sin: taking a manifesto that is 68 words long and turning it into a multibillion-dollar certification industry"
These aren't critics. These are people with CSM, SAFe SPC, PMP, and RTE after their names. They sell certifications and coaching for a living. The self-awareness is there. The business model hasn't changed. Some numbers that stood out to me:
The original manifesto: 68 words, 4 values Scrum Alliance certifications issued: 1.4 million+ Average CSM certification cost: ~$1,000 SAFe full framework documentation: 800+ pages PMI stat shared today: 85% of executives say agility is critical, only 32% satisfied with implementation
That last one is interesting. A 53-point gap between "we need this" and "this works." PMI's response: they're releasing a new Manifesto for Enterprise Agility on March 3rd. More framework to solve a framework problem. The CEO of PMI actually replied to a comment I left questioning this approach. His response was that the new manifesto "is NOT about software development" — even though his own post opened by celebrating the Agile Software Development manifesto. In fairness, some counter-arguments I want to acknowledge:
Agile genuinely helped some organizations move away from rigid waterfall. The pre-Agile world was often worse. The comparison shouldn't be Agile vs. perfection, it should be Agile vs. what came before. Certifications, flawed as the model is, did spread ideas that many teams benefited from. The 2-day CSM course is shallow, but it introduced concepts that some people built on meaningfully. The manifesto authors didn't create the certification industry. Scrum predates the manifesto, and the commercial ecosystem grew around it somewhat independently. Some Scrum Masters and Agile coaches are genuinely good at their jobs. The criticism is about the systemic incentives, not every individual.
That said, I keep coming back to a structural question: when the organizations that define, certify, and sell a framework also measure its adoption, is there a realistic path to honest assessment of whether it works? Curious about HN's experience. Has anyone here worked in an organization where Agile (specifically the framework, not just "being adaptive") produced meaningfully better outcomes than what came before? What made it work vs. the common failure modes?