The agile movement was about freeing developers from the baggage of Dilbertesque corporations. But in the 2020s, “doing agile” often comes at the cost of agility. Teams and companies sacrifice common-sense at the altar of a hustle culture, that looks agile, but is far from the spirit of the movement.

Copy-pasting office-centric practices rarely works for remote and distributed teams. Three such practices suck, when you attempt them remotely.

In a world of work that’s changed rapidly in the two years of the pandemic, I feel we need to ask the “Why” more than ever before. This is a new normal and as we switch between work patterns, such as forced-remote, remote-first, all-remote and hybrid, some practices will have to die. Others may have to change.

In this post, I want to explore two sprint ceremonies with a “Why” lens. I’ll also share a few ways you can buy back time for your team by taking lightweight, more async-friendly approaches to manage iterative development.

When you’re in a remote setup, think of your retro not as a meeting, but as a process. That process has two parts - asynchronous and synchronous. How much you do asynchronously is totally up to you and how adept you feel with working this way. This post will tell you how to run effective retros distributed team, with a solid sprinkling of asynchronous methods.

In today’s post, we’ll dive into the agile sprint - a time-box of approximately two weeks, when development teams work on a set of user stories they’ve prioritised to deliver. We’ll examine two synchronous collaboration practices - story kick-offs and dev-box tests or desk checks and how we can adapt them to a remote-native; async-first way of working.

Distributed standups are painful, period. With modern tools there are better ways of getting the value you’d expect from such a meeting. As an individual, you’ll get back a few minutes of your life every day. The bigger benefit? You can share updates continuously, and at your own pace. From a team perspective, you’ll be able to create an audit trail of communication and, of course, plough back the time savings into deep work.