Agile

Agile is older than most people realise (the manifesto is from 2001) and worse-implemented than most teams will admit. The original idea was simple: planning further out than you can predict is wasted work, so plan short, ship, learn, replan. Everything else (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, sprints, retros, story points) is implementation detail layered on top.

The most useful question for a team that says it is “doing agile” is: when was the last time the plan changed because of what shipped last week? If the answer is never, the team is doing waterfall in two-week chunks.

Worked example of the difference: two teams both run two-week sprints. Team A demos, sees that the feature nobody on the roadmap predicted is the one users actually click, and reorders next sprint around it. Team B demos, notes the feedback in a doc, and proceeds with the plan they wrote in January because the plan is the plan. Team A is agile. Team B has agile ceremonies and a waterfall brain. The ceremonies are identical; only the willingness to act on evidence differs, and that is the whole ballgame.

The honest trade-off and the founder mistake: agile is not a license to skip planning, and it is not free. It trades long-horizon predictability for fast learning, which is exactly wrong when scope, regulation, or an interface contract genuinely cannot change (certified medical devices, avionics, some hardware). Even there the original principles apply inside the team; the public-facing process just looks more like waterfall. Wavect is agile in the original sense: we work in short cycles, demo often, lean on CI/CD so shipping is cheap, and we are willing to throw out work that turned out to be wrong. We are skeptical of the certification-industry version of agile, where the meeting cadence becomes the goal and a TDD suite gets written for show rather than for confidence.