« Learn practises and Learn how to live without them

Agile is hard to embrace, agile is hard to teach.

“The problem” (and the strength) of agile development is that it never defines strict rules to follow always and in any occasion.

I can imagine myself being a consultant preaching RUP (IBM I am not impressed with you guys preaching agile), I’ll give to the client the book, I’ll tell them to follow my rules, end of the story.

Now, let’s forget the manifesto, let’s forget all the blog posts, the white papers, the conferences.

What the world agile means? I’ve searched on the Mac Dictionary application

It says:

agile |?aj?l|
adjective
able to move quickly and easily : Ruth was as agile as a monkey | figurative his vague manner concealed an agile mind.

That’s all you need, be agile like a monkey.

Embrace iterations of two weeks? Fine, after some time if you feel like you can go faster without, take them off.

Embrace a retrospective per iteration? Fine, after some time if you feel like they are not making you go faster, take them off.

Embrace the iteration planning meeting? Fine, after some time if you feel like they are not making you go faster, take them off.

And once you took off all the practices, start from scratch, try to understand if re-introducing them will make you go faster, be agile like a monkey in the jungle, don’t follow pre defined paths.