Agile theater

[#1]

A standup where 3 product managers ask for percent complete is not a standup.

It's a status report.

Some engineers have started calling this Agile with none of the actual agility:

→ 90-minute daily standups
→ Story cards created with no requirements attached
→ Estimates at the epic level, months out
→ Retros that produce action items nobody follows through on
→ Deployments gated behind change requests approved by someone who doesn't understand the change

The rituals are Agile. The feedback loops are not.

Agile is supposed to put decisions close to the work. Short cycles, visible blockers, context shared by the people doing the work. When the ceremony gets adopted without that intent, teams route around it.

The actual coordination moves to Slack DMs. Sidebar conversations before the standup. A shared doc someone updated once. The context that moves the work doesn't live in the ceremony. It lives in the conversations the ceremony was supposed to surface, and usually disappears with them.

That's where delivery breaks down. Not in the planning. In the reasoning that never got written down.

[zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_]

I think the missing piece is making trade-offs explicit.

If something urgent comes in mid-sprint, something else should be consciously pushed out. Too often teams absorb both, and the sprint quietly becomes unrealistic.

[Luis Ortiz - Catapult Labs]

"Agile in name only." You both hit on the exact same underlying issue: when the ceremony is disconnected from the actual work system, everything degrades into shadow IT (Slack DMs, hidden trade-offs, and ignored action items).

To your point about "Retros that produce action items nobody follows through on", the reason retro action items die is that they usually live on an external whiteboard or a disconnected Confluence page. And because they aren't converted into actual Jira tickets, they become invisible work. When a team tries to implement a continuous improvement action item but it isn't tracked on the active sprint board, they are quietly absorbing unmeasured scope; exactly what Zoltan warned about with mid-sprint feature requests.

Full Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Catapult Labs, and we build native Agile ceremony apps inside Jira precisely to kill this type of Agile Theater.

We fundamentally believe that if a retro action item isn't on the sprint board with an assignee and a clear estimate next to it, it is just a wish.

The ceremony shouldn't end until the team's qualitative insights are converted into quantitative execution data, right where the developers actually work.

How are you both handling the "invisible work" generated from retrospectives today—do you force those action items into the active sprint backlog, or do they usually just stay on the whiteboard?