I’ve been catching up on articles and podcasts about Agile development, and how “it’s dead”.

http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/
http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-Agile.html

Both articles talk not about how “Agile software development is dead” or “wrong” or “no longer hip” or any of that. It talks about the community misinterpreting and abusing the concepts of Agile (and Scrum).

Some stuff on what I feel is going on.

Absence of Method

The notion of “Agile = no planning”. I’m sure it has gone away quite a bit now, but I still hear about it. Agile doesn’t mean that you can just develop without any planning. In fact, I even believe that Agile requires a larger devotion to the process, more than traditional waterfall development.

Method Before Philosophy

I personally am also guilty of this - We hear sprints, iterations, daily stand-ups, retrospectives, and we decide to use them. But we forget WHY they exist.
Agile is philosophy of iterative/incremental development and frequent delivery. All other rituals, like those of Scrum, are just formats of how to execute on that philosophy.
If you can’t show your customer/stakeholer a (potentially) shippable product by the end of the iteration, something isn’t right. If majority of the duration of the project is being spent on planning rather than developing, something isn’t right.

Scrum master certificate

I believe that the Scrum Master certification is a good idea for people who already have had enough in-field experience with scrum, to get a deeper understanding. But I don’t think it works the other way around - If you haven’t had in-field experience, there is no way you will become a functional scrum master just with the few days of training. Scrum is learned in field with the different problems that come with different sizes/types of projects.
I believe there is a lot more commercial interest behind the Scrum Master certification.

My mission lately is to learn and enlighten my team on a more efficient and motivating software development. The answer surely isn’t blindly following Scrum methodologies, but it certainly is a start, so I want to do it right.