It is Friday, 3pm. Fourteen people are on a Jira refinement call.
Two engineers are nine minutes into deciding whether a bug is a 3 or a 5. The PO is screen-sharing a spreadsheet at a font size you’d need a court order to read. Three cameras are off; two of those people are in another meeting right now, in a different tab, doing this exact thing.
Somebody is eating. Somebody is always eating.
Nobody is fixing anything. Everybody is updating something.
Your company calls this agile.
It is the opposite of agile. To see why, you have to know what agile was actually for — and almost nobody does anymore.
Scrum was a rebellion
Here is what Scrum was for. Just this. Nothing else.
Before it, software was built the way you build a bridge. A year of planning. A year of building. And at the end — the discovery that the plan had been wrong for eleven of those months, and that finding out is now extremely expensive.
So a group of people revolted. Their idea was small and almost embarrassingly obvious: stop planning for a year. Build the smallest real thing. Put it in front of a real user. Watch what breaks. Change course while changing course is still cheap. Then do it again.
That was the whole rebellion. Ship fast, iterate. Build, ship, learn, correct — a loop, and the loop was the point. Everything else was scaffolding bolted on to protect the loop. The standup existed to surface a blocker before it cost a week. The retro existed to delete process that had stopped working. None of the ceremonies were the point. They were never the point.
The founding document says so in its first line — individuals and interactions over processes and tools. The movement’s own charter tells you, in writing, that the process is not the king.
Then everyone missed the point
The rebellion won. And winning is what killed it.
The moment it won, it became mandatory. It became a thing you adopt. It became a line on every job posting — “must have agile experience.” It became a certification you can pay a weekend and a few hundred euro to receive: you can now be a certified member of the rebellion. The revolt against process now has an exam. Sit with that one.
And once it was mandatory, it stopped meaning anything. “Are you agile?” turned into a yes/no compliance question, like a fire inspection. Teams get audited for Scrum — not “are you shipping,” but “did you hold the ceremony, is the board filled, is the burndown chart burning down.” Do the rituals, you pass. Question the rituals, you are the problem. Doing Scrum and doing engineering quietly became the same word — and that word stopped pointing at anything.
Now look closely at what your company actually does.
The roadmap is fixed twelve months out. The work was decomposed and assigned at a planning offsite in January. You “ship” every two weeks — to staging. A real human being sees the thing in Q4. And you will, once again, find out at the very end that it was wrong.
That is waterfall. A year-long plan, delivered at the end, sliced into two-week pieces with a standup on top. You did not escape the thing the rebellion overthrew. You renamed its phases “sprints,” put its corpse in a Scrum t-shirt, kept the standups and the board and the points — and quietly commented out the only line that ever mattered: the one where a real user runs the code.
There is an old line about how the next time the dangerous thing arrives, it will not use its old name. It will arrive wearing the name of its opposite. Waterfall didn’t die. It learned. It came back, and this time it is called Agile.
The dashboard is green. The green is fake.
You can tell the corpse is in the room by what gets counted.
You can write 800 lines of code this week, ship nothing, and have a bad week. You can write zero lines and have a tremendous one — three refinements, two reviews, four Slack threads where you “raised a thoughtful concern.” Performance review: exceeds expectations.
The dashboard is green. It is green because you spent forty minutes filling in Jira fields nobody reads, and it reports to a director who changed teams two quarters ago and has never opened it. It measures activity — because activity is the only thing waterfall has ever produced. It does not measure the one thing iteration was invented for: a real user, touching a real thing, soon.
Nothing shipped. The dashboard is green. Both are true at once, and only one of them matters.
So how do you get it back
You don’t need a new framework. The cure for bad Scrum is not good Scrum. It is remembering the point and aiming straight at it.
The point is the loop: build the smallest real thing, get it to a real user, learn, correct. So measure that, and nothing else. Did something reach a user this week? If yes, it was a good week — even if a ceremony got skipped. If no, it was a waterfall week — even if every ceremony was flawless and the burndown chart was a thing of beauty.
And run the ceremonies as experiments, not monuments. A monument may not be questioned. An experiment can be cancelled for a month to see if anything breaks. Most won’t. The retro was always supposed to be the tool that does this cancelling — that was its entire job. Use it for that, or admit you are not running a retro. You are running a support group with a timer.
Five things you can say
You can’t argue a team back to the point. But you can ask five questions that drag the point back into the room.
“When does a real user actually touch this?” If the honest answer is “Q4,” you are not iterating. You are doing waterfall with extra ceremonies.
“What would break if we didn’t do this?” Ask it inside the ceremony, about the ceremony. Then count the seconds of silence. The silence is the answer.
“Let’s cancel it for a month and see.” Removal sounds permanent, and permanent frightens people. “And see” turns it into an experiment. Nobody argues with “and see.”
“Which problem does this solve — today’s, or 2021’s?” Most process is still solving a problem that died years ago. This makes the corpse visible without anyone having to be the villain.
“The dashboard is green. Did anything ship?” The only question that matters, and the exact one the dashboard was built so nobody asks. Ask it anyway. Ask it every week.
None of these five will get you promoted. All of them get you closer to the point.
The apostate
You will not be thanked for this. Doing Scrum has become a kind of faith, and you have just asked, out loud, whether the building is on fire. There is a word for the person who does that, and it is not “collaborative.”
Ask anyway. Ship something small this week — to a real user, not to staging. Watch what breaks. Change course. That is the whole rebellion. It was never the standup. It was never the board.
The work was supposed to be the point. Somewhere along the line it became the side effect — the thing that happens, if there’s time, once the process has been served.
By order of thebeanengineer.com — serve the work. Let the process wait for once. Be an engineer. 🚀