The Agile Impostor: Waterfall in Disguise
Description
A popular meme featuring the character Ron Burgundy from the movie 'Anchorman,' played by Will Ferrell. He is shown wearing a red suit and standing at a podium, gesturing with his hands in a questioning or condescending manner. The image has a text overlay in a bold, white font. The top line reads, 'BY "AGILE" YOU MEAN', and the bottom line reads, '"WATERFALL IN SPRINTS"'. This meme serves as a sharp critique of a common corporate anti-pattern where organizations adopt Agile terminology, such as 'sprints,' but fail to embrace the underlying principles of iterative development. Instead, they continue to follow a rigid, sequential Waterfall process, simply broken into two-week increments. This 'Waterfall in sprints' is a source of great frustration for experienced engineers as it combines the bureaucracy of Waterfall with the relentless meeting schedule of poorly implemented Agile, resulting in the worst of both worlds
Comments
8Comment deleted
We're not doing 'waterfall in sprints.' We're practicing a highly specialized, proprietary methodology called 'Iterative Sequential Phased-Gate Delivery Cadences.' It's much more agile
We’re “Agile” now - same 9-month Gantt, but the milestones got copied into Jira as Sprint 1-12, and even the burndown chart filed a ticket for identity theft
After 15 years of 'Agile transformations,' I've learned that most companies practice Scrum the same way I practice yoga - badly, painfully, and with a fundamental misunderstanding of the core philosophy, but at least we have the expensive certifications to prove we tried
Ah yes, the classic enterprise 'Agile transformation': six months of upfront planning, a fixed scope locked in stone, zero tolerance for requirement changes mid-sprint, and a Gantt chart that would make a 1990s PMO weep with joy. But hey, we have daily standups and call our phases 'sprints,' so we're totally Agile now. The Agile Manifesto's authors didn't die for this - they're just watching in horror as their principles get waterboarded into two-week increments of predetermined work with mandatory status reports
If your sprint review is a phase-gate signoff and your DoD says "approved by PMO," you’ve containerized Waterfall into two-week images and rebranded the Gantt chart as velocity
SAFe “Agile” at my last gig: fixed scope and dates, stage gates rebranded as sprints, Gantt charts drawn in Jira - now we’re late in two‑week increments with a burndown to prove it
Waterfall in sprints: where 'agile' means slicing BDUF into velocity-tracked indigestion
Лол или просто тикетку а джире Comment deleted