Post-Agile Development: Why Smart Teams Are Looking Backward to Move Forward

Source: Dev.to

The Problem with Modern Agile

Right now, a developer is sitting in their third meeting of the day. A product owner drags sticky notes across a Miro board, explaining why the sprint commitment needs to change. Again.

This isn’t a failure of that particular team. It’s where an entire industry ends up when it adopts a methodology as religion instead of tooling.

The question is no longer “how do we do Agile better?” It’s “what comes after Agile?”

Agile in most organizations isn’t the lightweight, developer‑empowering methodology described in the original manifesto. It’s a bureaucratic overlay combining the worst aspects of rigid planning and chaotic improvisation.

• Planning poker has become performance art. Eight engineers hold up Fibonacci cards for a vague user story. The person who knows the codebase says 21. Everyone else guesses lower. After 30 minutes they “agree” on 8. The number means nothing.
• Daily stand‑ups are attendance rituals: “Yesterday I continued working on the authentication refactor. Today I’ll continue working on the authentication refactor. No blockers.” Repeated fourteen times. Nobody learns anything they couldn’t have gotten from a Slack message.
• Retrospectives change nothing. Every two weeks teams identify the same problems—too many meetings, unclear requirements, technical debt—only for the action items to disappear quietly.

In our rush to reject everything associated with “waterfall,” we discarded practices that actually worked. There’s a vast middle ground between six‑month specification marathons and “we’ll figure it out as we go.” When you’re connecting to seven external APIs and three legacy databases, spending two weeks on architecture diagrams isn’t waste; it’s the only way to avoid building something that needs to be torn down.

“Working software over comprehensive documentation” has been weaponized into “documentation is waste.” The result? Knowledge trapped in heads, context lost when people leave, new team members spending weeks on code archaeology.

A few pages describing what a feature should do, why it matters, and how it interacts with existing systems? That’s not overhead. That’s professionalism.

Some projects have natural phases: research, design, implementation, stabilization. Forcing these into identical two‑week sprints creates artificial pressure and obscures actual progress. Phases don’t mean waterfall; they mean acknowledging that discovery work and production hardening are fundamentally different activities.

Real‑World Experiments

• The documentation‑first team – A fintech backend team required written technical specifications before implementation. After six months they saw fewer surprises, faster onboarding, reduced defects, and overall faster delivery.
• The meeting‑purge experiment – An infrastructure team audited ceremonies with one question: “What decision does this meeting enable that couldn’t happen otherwise?” They eliminated daily stand‑ups, moved to monthly planning, and reclaimed ~12 hours per developer per month. Velocity increased roughly 20 %.
• The phase‑gate revival – A platform team adopted explicit phase gates with specific owners and real authority to block progress. They ship less frequently but with significantly higher quality.

How to Move Forward

1. Audit your ceremonies – For each meeting, document time spent, decisions that emerged, and what would happen if you skipped it.
2. Identify actual pain points – Requirements ambiguity? Coordination failures? Technical debt? Map your problems, then ask which your current process actually addresses.
3. Run small experiments –
   • “For this quarter, let’s try written specs for large features.”
   • “Let’s experiment with async stand‑ups for one month.”
     Measure outcomes.
4. Create a team working agreement – Document what you will and won’t do. Review quarterly and evolve deliberately.

The Path Forward

The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001. It would be strange if a methodology designed for 2001’s challenges were perfectly suited to 2025’s reality.

The best teams are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They use stand‑ups when stand‑ups help and skip them when they don’t. They write detailed specs when complexity demands it and use lightweight user stories when simplicity allows.

They don’t ask “Is this Agile?” They ask “Does this work?” That’s the only question that matters.

Frameworks, certifications, and consulting methodologies are tools, not religions. Use what works. Discard what doesn’t. Stop feeling guilty about it.

Full article with case studies and implementation details at agilelie.com.