Are we actually doing Agile or just playing pretend?
I'm starting to wonder if our team is really doing agile development or if we're just going through motions
We switched to agile about 18 months ago and have all the usual stuff - daily standups, sprint planning sessions, retrospectives, sprint demos, backlog refinement. We use project tracking software, estimate story points, measure team velocity. Our scrum master even has proper certification
Here's what bothers me though
Our sprints are basically just taking a roadmap that executives created 4-5 months ago and chopping it into 2-week pieces. If we want to change anything during a sprint we need to get approval from upper management first
Every retrospective we end up with same action items about "better communication" or "more accurate estimates" but nothing actually changes in how we work. We've been saying we'll fix the same issues for like 6-7 months now
All our requirements come from management as complete specifications. When they say "collaboration" they just mean we figure out technical implementation. Nobody on the team ever talks with real users
We spend way more time updating tickets and explaining why our velocity changed than actually writing code
When we try pushing back about unrealistic timelines or too much scope, management says "you need to be more agile - agile means adapting fast"
We still can't deploy anything without going through change approval process that takes 2-3 weeks, but then leadership wonders why we're not delivering faster
I've read the agile manifesto and it talks about responding to change, working software over documentation, collaborating with customers, having empowered teams
But it feels like we just do whatever was decided months ago, except we do it in 2-week chunks and call it agile
Few questions for people here:
- Is this how most companies do agile or is something wrong with ours?
- What does real agile actually look like in practice?
- How much autonomy should agile teams really have?
- Am I expecting too much from agile methodology?