Your team "does Agile."
You have two week sprints. Daily standups. Sprint planning and retrospectives. You estimate with story points. You track velocity.
You check all the Agile boxes.
But here's the uncomfortable question: are you actually Agile, or are you just doing waterfall in two week chunks?
What Waterfall Actually Is
Waterfall gets a bad rap, but let's be clear what it means:
You plan everything upfront. Gather all requirements, design the full system, estimate the work, commit to a timeline.
You execute the plan sequentially. Requirements, then design, then development, then testing, then deployment.
You resist changes. Once the plan is set, deviating is expensive and discouraged.
You deliver at the end. Nothing ships until it's "done."
This works fine for predictable projects with stable requirements. Building a bridge? Waterfall is great.
Building software? Not so much.
What Agile Actually Is
Agile was a response to waterfall's problems. The manifesto says:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Notice what's not in there:
- Sprints
- Story points
- Standups
- Velocity
- Scrum
Agile is a mindset, not a process. It's about adaptability, feedback, and continuous delivery.
The Agile Theater
But here's what many teams actually do:
Sprint planning: Spend two hours planning the sprint. Commit to a scope. Treat it like a mini waterfall phase.
Sprint commitment: "We committed to these stories. We have to deliver them, even if priorities changed."
Velocity as a contract: "We did 30 points last sprint. We should do 30 this sprint." Now the team is locked into a target.
Quarterly roadmaps: Plan three months of work upfront. Treat the roadmap as fixed. Resist changes because "it's not on the roadmap."
Big releases: Work for weeks on a feature branch. Merge it all at once. Hope it works.
This is waterfall with shorter cycles. You're doing all the same things, just more frequently.
The Tell Tale Signs
Here's how you know your Agile is really waterfall:
You resist mid sprint changes. "We can't change priorities now, we're in the middle of a sprint."
You treat estimates as commitments. "We said 5 points, so it should be done by Friday."
You plan far in advance. Roadmaps that stretch months ahead with committed features.
You batch your releases. Deploy once a sprint, or less. Everything goes out together.
You have separate testing phases. Dev finishes, then QA tests, then it goes to prod. Sequential, not continuous.
You optimize for throughput, not learning. Ship stories, not insights.
If these describe your team, you're not Agile. You're iterative waterfall.
Why It Happens
Teams fall into this trap because:
Stakeholders demand predictability. They want roadmaps, timelines, commitments. So you give them that, even though it's antithetical to Agile.
You confuse Scrum with Agile. Scrum is one framework. It's prescriptive and can become rigid. That's not the same as being Agile.
You cargo cult the practices. You adopt standups and sprints without understanding the principles behind them.
Change is uncomfortable. True agility means constantly adjusting. That's hard. It's easier to make a plan and stick to it.
What True Agility Looks Like
If you're actually Agile:
You welcome change mid sprint. Priorities shift? No problem. Drop what's less important and pick up what matters now.
You ship continuously. Multiple deploys per day. Every commit could go to prod.
You plan iteratively. You know what you're building this week. Next week is fuzzy. Next month is a guess.
You optimize for learning. You ship small experiments, get feedback, pivot based on what you learn.
You measure outcomes, not output. Did the feature improve the metric we care about? Not, did we close 30 story points?
You trust the team. No commitments, no velocity targets. Just: here's the goal, go figure it out.
This is uncomfortable. There's no plan to point to. No timeline to promise. No velocity to report.
But it's also faster, more responsive, and more likely to build the right thing.
The Hybrid Reality
To be fair, most teams can't be purely Agile.
The business needs some predictability. You can't just shrug when asked "when will this be ready?"
Coordination requires some planning. If you're integrating with other teams, total chaos doesn't work.
Compliance and regulations matter. Some industries require documentation and process.
So most teams compromise. You use sprints for rhythm. You do some upfront planning. You try to balance adaptability with predictability.
That's fine. But don't call it Agile if you're not willing to respond to change.
The Honest Conversation
Here's what teams should ask:
Are we using Agile as an excuse to avoid commitment? Or as an excuse to demand rigid commitment?
Are we optimizing for looking Agile, or being Agile? Standups and retrospectives are theater if you're not actually adapting.
Are we actually shipping faster and learning more? Or are we just doing waterfall with more meetings?
Be honest. If your "Agile" is just a way to do the same old stuff with new terminology, stop pretending.
Either commit to the principles (adaptability, continuous delivery, customer feedback) or admit you're doing iterative waterfall.
Both can work. But only if you're honest about what you're doing.
The Bottom Line
Is your Agile just waterfall with extra steps?
If you plan everything upfront, resist change, and batch your releases, then yes.
True agility is about responsiveness, learning, and continuous delivery. It's messy, uncomfortable, and hard to forecast.
If you're not willing to embrace that, don't call yourself Agile.
Just call it what it is: iterative waterfall. And that's okay. At least you're being honest.
But if you want the benefits Agile promises (speed, adaptability, customer focus), you have to actually practice the principles, not just the rituals.
Ship small. Ship often. Learn constantly. Adapt ruthlessly.
That's Agile. Everything else is just theater.