[jacques_chester]

> I had the best time ever just sitting in meetings on Tuesday mornings to demo everything in person then do code review with my CTO after. Talk with the whole team including marketing on what we'd work on. I loved it. No agile, was completely in the know and performing.

I know I'm discussing Scotsmen here, but: what about this is not agile?

[ellius]

There’s:

• Agile as a set of values

• Agile as a set of practices

• Agile as a faddish silver bullet marketed to people who don’t know any better

I assume OP is thinking mainly of the latter two. It sounds like their business avoided formal standups and sprint planning, and didn’t generally care about Agile/Scrum etc. buzzwords. But I tend to agree with you that from a values perspective that seems perfectly Agile.

[jacques_chester]

I think you're right.

Agile has a dirty name now, but it's well-deserved, because most folks have had legitimately terrible experiences with stuff sailing under that banner.

I've had a legitimately awesome experience and I can't really use a different word, because it either creates confusion or sounds like sneaky wordplay and/or self-marketing hoopla.

I had a job where, due to the technology, I could not TDD. There was no sane way to version control. No CI/CD, changes had to be made in dev and then copied & pasted into prod. Before that I was in a job with pairing, TDD, CI/CD and an avowed commitment to agile.

Of the two, the ostensibly-not-agile was more agile, because it hewed closer to the values of talking to people and focusing on doing the most valuable thing first. I would work on projects by myself. When I wanted to learn more about my customers, I walked across the campus and talked to them. If I had something I wanted them to give their opinion on, I would ring them and tell them to take a look.

At the ostensibly-agile job we had a manager who talked to a middleman who talked to a board of directors who heard from a line manager who talked to his employees. It didn't matter how well we did the inner loop, because a lot of the time we just produced beautifully-engineered diversions.