Agile Anti-patterns¶

Most failed agile adoptions do not reject the principles, they keep the ceremonies and quietly drop the feedback loops. The label survives, the agility does not.

Cargo cult agile¶

The team performs every event correctly and changes nothing about how it works. Stand-ups happen, the board is updated, and requirements still arrive fully specified from outside. Ceremony without inspection and adaptation is cost with no benefit.

Tell: ask what changed as a result of the last three Retrospectives. If the answer is nothing, the process is decorative.

Water-Scrum-Fall¶

A long requirements phase up front and a long release or hardening phase at the end, with Sprints in the middle. The team is agile only during the part of the process that was never the bottleneck.

Tell: the first Increment reaches a real user months after the project starts.

What Water-Scrum-Fall looks like on a calendar¶

gantt
    title Water-Scrum-Fall, first user feedback arrives in month 8
    dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD
    axisFormat %b
    section Up front
    Requirements and design sign-off :a1, 2026-01-01, 90d
    section Sprints
    Sprint 1 to 6                    :a2, after a1, 84d
    section Release
    Integration and hardening        :a3, after a2, 60d
    First real user feedback         :milestone, after a3, 0d

The Sprints are real, and the feedback loop is still eight months long, so the team gets the cost of the ceremonies without the benefit.

Scrum as a delivery mechanism for fixed scope¶

Fixed scope, fixed date, fixed budget, and Sprints used as progress reporting. Because nothing can flex, the only variable left is quality, and it is silently spent.

Tell: every Sprint ends with unfinished work rolled forward, and the release date never moves.

Velocity as a target¶

Covered in Estimation and Velocity. A velocity target inflates estimates, and a velocity comparison between teams rewards whoever inflates fastest.

The Scrum Master as project manager¶

Assigning tasks, chasing status, reporting individual progress upward. This removes self-organization, which is where most of the adaptive capacity lives.

Proxy product owner¶

A Product Owner with no authority to say no, who relays decisions from a committee. Every question takes days, and priority is decided by whoever escalated most recently.

No technical practices¶

Scrum prescribes no engineering practices, so teams that add none find that after a year they cannot deliver a Done Increment in two weeks. The codebase, not the process, becomes the constraint. This is the gap XP exists to fill.

Summary¶

Anti-pattern	What broke	Fix
Cargo cult agile	Adaptation	Make Retrospective outcomes real Sprint Backlog items
Water-Scrum-Fall	Feedback latency	Ship a thin end-to-end slice early
Fixed everything	Scope flexibility	Make the trade-off explicit with MoSCoW
Velocity target	Transparency	Forecast with ranges, never targets
Scrum Master as PM	Self-organization	Team pulls work, Scrum Master removes impediments
Proxy Product Owner	Decision speed	One accountable person who can say no
No technical practices	Sustainable pace	Adopt TDD, CI and refactoring

Check Your Understanding¶

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A project fixes scope, date and budget, then runs two-week Sprints. What flexes?

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Which question best exposes cargo cult agile?