You’re bending your team/process to fit agile, and not bending agile to fit your team/process

Yeah, this one is tricky.

If a methodology is supposed to help, but you don’t change your processes in any way, then it seems odd to assert that you are “adopting” a methodology.

In fact, I would say that the typical dysfunctional Agile shop basically “bends agile” to fit their process, meaning they undertake a superficial exercise to map a problematic process to Agile terms and declare victory. Sometimes taking the time to actually make the process worse in a way they wanted to, under the smoke screen of “Agile transition”. For example, in my company customers are generally using our projects together, so we had basically a set cadence of release dates. All projects were only allowed to target designated release days (March 1st, June 1st, etc.) A project, if it made sense could skip a release window, but the projects wouldn’t just release 2 weeks differently than all the related projects. Project owners declared this “not Agile” and said everyone just release whenever, much to the complaints to customers that now have a barrage of updates that are in no way synced up, with QA that tried to use the projects as the customer would abolished, so until the customer there’s no one using the “current” editions of the projects together in one place. Agile is perfectly happy with a prescribed cadence (in fact I would say usually I hear the mantra that you try to fit your work to the schedule, rather than letting the work mess up the schedule), but development managers didn’t like the way the release schedule tied their hands so they blamed Agile for a really bad quality move.

I’m all about processes that fit your team, I just think fixation on Agile branding does more harm than good.