Rotten Agile: Final Part - The Nail in the Coffin

If the market itself can’t be agile, then what it's promoting is bullshit.

Thanks for sticking with me through this series. If you’ve missed any parts, I’ve linked them below so you can follow the trail of dysfunction:

🔗 Part 1 – Fragmented Camps
🔗 Part 2 – No Standard, No Baseline
🔗 Part 3 – Blame Culture
🔗 Part 4 – Dogma, Ego, and Status
🔗 Part 5 – Certification Scam
🔗 Part 6 – The Illusion of Agility

Now, let’s recap.

Why the Agile Market Is Rotten at its Core

1. Everyone fights for their patch.
In Part 1, I called out the fractured and tribal state of the Agile marketplace. Agile is no longer one community. It’s splintered into camps such Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, XP, and dozens of niche methods. Each claiming superiority, defending their turf, and refusing to collaborate. Instead of advancing the profession, they bicker, compete, and sabotage any hope of unity. What started as a shared movement has become a noisy battleground of consultants, empires, and thought leaders fighting for attention and market share.

The result? Confusion. Division. Stagnation.

We’ve traded progress for personal brands. The agile market isn’t evolving—it’s fracturing. And in the noise, people new to Agile are left lost, misled, or exploited. This isn’t thought diversity. It’s a disorganised mess that’s tearing the industry apart.

2. There is no standard, and no baseline.
In Part 2, I tore into the fact that Agile has no real standards. Anyone can call anything “Agile” and get away with it. There’s no baseline, no guardrails, no shared expectations. Just buzzwords, frameworks, and personal interpretations. We’ve normalised chaos and labelled it agility. And because there’s no standard, bad ideas flourish and good practice gets drowned in noise.

The result? A marketplace where junk gets sold as innovation. Teams are left guessing. Leaders are sold smoke. And the industry keeps turning in circles. If Agile had a standard, we’d at least know what we’re arguing about. But right now, it’s a free-for-all where the people who suffer most are the ones trying to do the work.

3. We reward blame and fear.
In Part 3, I exposed how Agile has become a blame machine. When things go wrong, teams get blamed. Coaches blame leaders. Leaders blame teams. And everyone blames the framework. Instead of owning outcomes, we point fingers, hide behind ceremonies, and protect reputations. Retrospectives become performance reviews. Psychological safety is just a slide on a deck. No one’s learning—just surviving.

This culture of blame kills trust, kills improvement, and kills agility. People are too afraid to speak up or experiment. Failure isn’t a chance to learn, it’s a career risk. And the worst part? We still pretend it’s working. Agile promised empowerment. What we got was deflection, fear, and finger-pointing.

4. We worship frameworks and figureheads.
In Part 4, I went after the ego and dogma poisoning the Agile space. Too many so-called experts act like gatekeepers, treating their favourite framework as gospel and shutting down anything that doesn’t fit their narrative. It’s not about helping teams. It's about being right, being followed, and being seen as the authority. Agility has been hijacked by personalities more interested in status than outcomes.

This obsession with being the smartest in the room is killing progress. We’re not solving problems, instead we’re arguing over methods, titles, and who’s more “agile”. The humility and curiosity that once defined the movement are gone. In their place? Fragile egos, shallow thinking, and a market driven by noise, not knowledge.

5. Certification has become a joke.
In Part 5, I ripped into the Agile certification scam. Pay a fee, sit a quiz, walk out with a shiny title where there is no real skill, no real test, no accountability. It’s a cash machine, not a profession. We’ve flooded the market with underqualified “certified” practitioners who can’t deliver but still claim authority. It’s a joke, and everyone knows it.

This mess has trashed Agile’s credibility. Leaders don’t trust the titles. Teams don’t respect the roles. Real professionals are lumped in with the fakes. And the worst part? The industry lets it happen because it’s profitable. Mastery has been replaced with marketing, and the cost is being paid by every organisation that believed the hype.

6. We’ve lost the plot entirely.
In Part 6, I called out the illusion of agility. Teams adopt standups, boards, and new job titles and think they’re Agile. But nothing really changes. The same dysfunctions stay but with low morale, poor delivery, leadership confusion. We copied the rituals but skipped the thinking. Agility became theatre, not transformation.

We’ve been fed vague concepts with no substance, then left to figure it out alone. There’s no real help, no practical how-to, just buzzwords and false confidence. And when it doesn’t work, we blame the teams. The truth is, Agile was never going to work like this and deep down, we all know it.

The Nail in the Coffin

Agile was founded on a simple idea:

"We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it."

That’s the first line of the Manifesto.

But let’s be brutally honest. As a market, we are not doing that to fix these systemic issues.

We are not uncovering better ways.
We are not doing it.
We are not helping others do it.

Instead, we’re selling buzzwords, protecting turf, and propping up hollow reputations. The dysfunction is systemic. The silence on how we address these systemic problems from the so-called agile masterminds, the very people who wrote the Manifesto is deafening.

We are taught to help companies to inspect and adapt. But it refuses to do that itself.

The industry tells teams to focus on outcomes. But itself worships process, frameworks and appearance.

The industry tells people to be transparent. But it hides behind brands, titles, and rhetoric.

It’s a con.

A slow, corrosive rot that’s eroded trust, credibility, and any hope of true progress.

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The agile market cannot fix itself because it refuses to admit it’s broken.

Trying to change it doesn’t work. Too many people are guarding their turf with a fortification mindset. Rebuilding consumer trust is impossible while bad actors still exploit the system. Ignoring it and letting it continue is a race to the bottom and will not end well for everyone.

But companies still need to build and deliver products. They still need help to be effective. Right now, they’re more confused than ever. Some are even reverting to waterfall or hybrid approaches, which is alarming.

So maybe it’s time to stop trying to save it.

Let it end. Let the market collapse under the weight of its contradictions. Let’s clear the ground so something real can be built again. Let’s learn from all of this and make sure it does not happen again.

Just people who actually care about quality, delivery, value, and each other. People who want to move the industry forward. People who want to bring credibility back so they can truly help their customers or employers.

That’s where I’ll be. If you’re tired of the noise and ready for something better, come join me. We're not fixing agile. We’re building something new. Together.

It’s about being Practiqual.