Agile or Winging It

Hey Agile Folks, We Need to Talk About Planning I've been in and around software teams long enough to watch Agile go from a genuinely good idea to something that gets used as a hall pass for not thinking things through. And I think it's worth having an honest conversation about it, because I've seen it from both sides of the fence. The Problem Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud Here's what I keep running into. A team says they're "doing Agile," and what they really mean is they skipped the part where you sit down and figure out what you're actually building and why. No requirements. No discovery. No real conversation with the people who'll use the thing. Just, "Let's start sprinting and we'll figure it out." A 2024 study by Engprax and J.L. Partners surveyed 600 software engineers in the US and UK and found that projects with documented requirements before development began were 50% more likely to succeed. Projects with clear requirements were 97% more likely to succeed. That's not a roundin