For years, Agile has been one of the defining ideas in software development. It changed how teams build products, collaborate, and deliver value. Yet today, a different conversation is taking place.
Engineering teams question whether Agile still helps them move faster. Organisations struggle with large-scale transformations. Even long-time advocates admit that something no longer feels right.
So, is Agile actually dead?
The answer is both simpler and more uncomfortable than many people expect.
At Agile Tour Vienna 2025, consultant and author Gojko Adzic argued that Agile itself is not the problem. The problem is what the industry built around it. This article explores that argument, combines it with recent industry data, and asks a more useful question:
If Agile isn’t the future anymore, what is?
What began in the early 2000s as a genuine reaction to the madness of thousand-page specifications and multi-year delivery cycles gradually became a hiring filter, a conference circuit, and a certification industry.
Agile stopped being a practice and became a brand. Like many brands without a clear commercial owner, it was eventually applied to everything until it meant almost nothing.
Gojko drew a sharp parallel to Star Wars: three films with a clear premise, followed by decades of content that slowly diluted the original idea until even the central conflict became negotiable. At some point, you’re no longer protecting a brand—you are simply licensing it.
The institutional signals are difficult to ignore. In January 2025, the Agile Alliance joined the Project Management Institute (PMI). The organisation founded by several authors of the Agile Manifesto is now part of the world’s largest project management organisation.
The movement that once questioned heavyweight project management is now housed inside the organisation best known for certifying it.
The annual State of Agile Report is often cited as evidence that Agile continues to thrive.
Yet the 17th edition quietly acknowledged something previous editions largely avoided:
Agile is struggling to adapt.
Medium and large organizations report increasing dissatisfaction with Agile at scale. Nearly half of respondents said fewer than half of their colleagues actually use Agile—even after more than twenty years of widespread adoption. It’s worth remembering that these surveys are largely completed by people who continue working in Agile environments. Organizations that have abandoned Agile rarely participate.
The hiring market tells an even clearer story.
In January 2023, Capital One eliminated more than 1,100 Agile-related positions—not as a cost-cutting exercise, but because the company believed Agile delivery should become part of engineering rather than exist as a separate function. Scrum.org acknowledged that this wasn’t evidence that Agile had „won.“ Instead, it suggested that roles centered primarily on process facilitation were becoming harder to justify.
One of Gojko’s most compelling observations is that Agile now describes two very different worlds.
These practices have become standard engineering discipline. Most successful teams no longer describe them as „Agile.“ They simply call them good engineering.
The second world consists of Scrum ceremonies, SAFe transformations, scaled frameworks, and organizational process design.
This is the part currently under the greatest pressure. As AI reduces coordination costs and organizations rethink how software gets built, many of these structures are being questioned. For practitioners working in this space, the answer isn’t abandoning Agile altogether.
It’s expanding beyond process facilitation into leadership, coaching, product thinking, organizational design, and engineering understanding.
Those looking to strengthen these capabilities can build a solid foundation through our Certified Scrum Master (CSM) training and continue developing leadership and coaching skills in the Advanced Certified Scrum Master (A-CSM) program.
Build your solid foundation through our training and continue developing your leadership and coaching journey.
This is perhaps the most uncomfortable part of Gojko’s argument.
Technology rarely removes work. It removes intermediaries.
Every major technological shift compresses the distance between intention and execution. Artificial intelligence is beginning to do exactly that in software engineering. As AI reduces the effort required to generate code, documentation, and even implementation plans, organizations need fewer people whose primary contribution is coordinating information between specialists. That doesn’t make people less valuable. It simply shifts value toward expertise, judgement, decision-making, and ownership.
In 2001, the biggest challenge was shipping software. Deployment was slow. Feedback cycles were expensive. Releases happened months apart. Agile directly attacked that bottleneck.
Today, that constraint has largely disappeared. Continuous delivery, cloud infrastructure, and automation have made software deployment remarkably cheap.
The bottleneck has moved.
Today’s challenge is understanding what should be built, for whom, and why. It is defining problems precisely enough that teams—and increasingly AI—can solve them effectively. That’s why the most important conversations in software development have shifted toward product thinking, continuous discovery, experimentation, and outcomes.
Velocity charts and perfect Scrum ceremonies matter far less than learning quickly whether you’re solving the right problem. The best teams understood this years ago. The rest are now discovering that Agile ceremonies were never the goal. They were only ever a means to reach it.
Agile isn’t disappearing. The practices that genuinely improved software development—short feedback loops, iterative delivery, continuous learning, and working software over excessive documentation—will remain because they solve real problems.
What is disappearing is the scaffolding built around them.
The ceremonies. The labels. The framework-first thinking.
The future belongs less to methodologies and more to capabilities:
These are not „Agile skills.“ They are enduring engineering skills. The original Agile Manifesto pointed toward something fundamentally true:
Software is built by people, for people.
The closer teams stay to reality through fast feedback and honest learning, the better the outcomes become. That principle hasn’t changed. Everything around it has. The real question is no longer: Is Agile dead?
It’s:
What capabilities will make you indispensable over the next five years?
If that question interests you, our hands-on training programs—from Certified Scrum Master (CSM) to Advanced Certified Scrum Master (A-CSM)—focus on building exactly those capabilities rather than simply teaching a framework.
Build your solid foundation through our training and continue developing your leadership and coaching journey.