The Agile Apostle

He uses the word iteration the way other people use the word thinking.

He was there in the early days when agile meant something. He wrote user stories that were actually stories, with users in them, with needs that were specific and human and grounded. He ran retrospectives that changed things. He remembers when the ceremonies had substance.

But the ceremonies spread faster than the substance. And somewhere along the way he became the carrier of the ceremonies rather than the guardian of the substance. He teaches the rituals to organizations that have no business context for them. He has optimized the standup to fifteen minutes and the sprint to two weeks and the backlog to a state of permanent grooming and he has not asked, in recent memory, what decision all of this is building toward.

The Agile Apostle is a fallen saint. He was once doing the right thing. The church mourns what the spread of the methodology did to him.

We do not cast him out. We ask him to remember what a user story felt like when the user was real and the story was specific and the decision about what to build next was grounded in something other than velocity.

He remembers. You can see it sometimes, briefly, in the retrospective, before the next sprint begins.