Agile or Winging It

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

Hey Agile Folks, we need to talk about planning.

I’ve been in and around software teams long enough to watch Agile go from a genuinely good idea to something that gets used as a hall pass for not thinking things through. It’s worth having an honest conversation about it, because I’ve seen it from both sides of the fence.

The Problem with Misunderstood Agile

A common pattern I keep running into is a team that says they’re “doing Agile,” but what they really mean is they skipped the part where you sit down and figure out what you’re actually building and why. No requirements. No discovery. No real conversation with the people who’ll use the thing. Just, “Let’s start sprinting and we’ll figure it out.”

The Agile Manifesto says to value responding to change over following a plan. Read that again: it says over, not instead of. You still need a plan—you just hold it loosely. Somewhere along the way, many teams heard “don’t plan” and ran with it, and the results speak for themselves.

I’ve watched teams burn months of budget building the wrong thing because nobody stopped to ask a few basic questions up front. If you skip upfront planning, you might not learn enough about what you’re taking on until you’re mid‑stream and expectations are already set. By then you’re in trouble, and everybody knows it.

Evidence and Studies

• Engprax & J.L. Partners (2024) surveyed 600 software engineers in the US and UK. Projects with documented requirements before development began were 50 % more likely to succeed; projects with clear requirements were 97 % more likely to succeed.
  Note: The Engprax study was conducted to promote a competing methodology and should be read with that context in mind.

• Standish Group CHAOS Report (2020), analyzing over 50,000 IT projects across 25 years, found that Agile projects are roughly three times more likely to succeed than traditional Waterfall projects, while Waterfall projects are twice as likely to fail outright.

• Meta‑analysis of 25 peer‑reviewed studies (Rietze et al., 2022) showed iterative approaches deliver 25–28 % faster time‑to‑market than linear processes. The key insight: iterative methods don’t skip planning; they distribute it throughout the work instead of front‑loading it into an outdated phase.

• Digital.ai State of Agile Reports consistently highlight the importance of balancing planning with adaptability.

What Agile Really Means

The original Agile thinkers were obsessed with design quality. Robert Martin’s foundational Agile book focused on SOLID principles, design patterns, and test‑driven development. Martin Fowler is synonymous with thoughtful software architecture. These pioneers weren’t saying “don’t think.” They were saying “don’t pretend you can think of everything before you start.”

The research and my own experience both point to the same place: you need “just enough” upfront work to establish a shared understanding of:

• What you’re building
• Who it’s for
• The big risks (domain modeling, architecture decisions, basic user research)

Then you iterate from there.

The problem isn’t Agile; the problem is lazy Agile—using the framework as cover for skipping the hard work of understanding your problem space. “We don’t need a test team because we’re Agile” isn’t a principle; it’s a budget cut wearing a hoodie.

Good Agile teams plan—they just plan differently. They plan enough to set a direction, then they learn and adjust as they go. Bad Agile teams don’t plan at all and call it a methodology.

If your team can’t answer “what problem are we solving and for whom” before the first sprint starts, you’re not being Agile. You’re just winging it.

Conclusion

Agile remains a powerful approach when applied correctly. The key is to combine lightweight, continuous planning with the flexibility to respond to change, rather than abandoning planning altogether.

Sources

• Engprax/J.L. Partners survey (2024)
• Standish Group CHAOS Reports (1994‑2020)
• Meta‑analysis of 25 peer‑reviewed studies on iterative vs. linear change management (Rietze et al., 2022)
• Digital.ai State of Agile Reports