The Agile Manifesto (parody) - By Dan Greenberg

courtesy of Dan Greenberg

These are the Agile Rules as specified in the Agile Manifesto:

1. User Stories are required. Every user story must use the format As a _____, I want _____ so that ______. If it is not written in that format, the Agile police will arrest you.

2. Story Points. Must use the Fibonacci sequence. However, not the full Fibonacci sequence. You must use 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 (note the deviation, for us math geeks, fibonacci would be 21, 34 instead of 20, 40, but Agile mandates the use of 20, 40). Every story must have a size on it in story points. We cannot overemphasize how important these numbers and metrics are. But oh no you better not talk about hours. You can secretly do some hours-to-points calculations in your head if you want (okay, this will take me about 3 days worth of work, that’s about 5 story points…) but if you say that out loud, you are NOT Agile and the Agile police will issue you a citation.

3. You must operate in Sprints. You must use 2-week Sprints. The Agile Manifesto specifies exactly 2 weeks, no more no less. Thou shalt. No arguments.

4. You must use Features and Epics. The Agile Manifesto is very specific about this.

5. Agile mandates Retrospectives. Every Retrospective must be conducted in a very strict format where each team member MUST contribute one item under “Went Well”, one item under “Did Not Go Well”, and one item under “Can Be Changed”. The leader of this meeting should one by one go through each item and… 

* For the “went well” column, read the item and remark “I agree that was great”

* For the “did not go well” column, read the item and remark “yes, that was a tough situation”

* For the “can be changed” column, read the item and remark “I am going to do a better job of that and our organization is working to make strides on improving upon that process”

Do NOT deviate whatsoever from this exact Retrospective format. The Agile rules are very clear on that. There should be no deviation and once the meeting host has read each item and made the above remarks, there should be no additional discussion and the meeting ends.

6. Agile mandates that you have a meeting entitled The Daily Standup. At this meeting, each person one by one needs to speak and prove that they are doing work. Each person must state what they did yesterday, what they are going to work on today, and they must include a section in their speech about Blockers. The meeting must be called The Daily Standup and it must use that format. Agile mandates this.

In Agile, process is of paramount importance. If you follow the above rules, you qualify as Agile. You can get the Agile Board of Directors to come to your organization, verify that you are doing each of those things, check you off, and then certify you as officially Agile. If you break any of the above rules, you cannot call yourselves Agile and if you break one of the rules and try to call yourselves Agile, the Agile police will definitely arrest you.