Every time I hear someone talk about using agile methodologies, I’m more convinced that we need to reinforce not just the message of adaptability, but also the discipline required to become truly efficient at delivering value. Agility is not about skipping steps — it’s about understanding deeply what we do, why we do it, and how to do it well, so we can make intentional choices about what to keep and what to let go.
A recent quote from Jeff Patton struck me: “Looking forward to the time when people use agile development to build great products, not just deliver dumb stuff faster.” It made me ask: are we delivering real value, or just shipping polished features faster? That difference often lies in how well we understand the customer’s problem — and our ability to turn that into meaningful software.
Before we talk about removing, automating, or simplifying things, we need to build real competence. Learn how to write good tests before saying TDD doesn’t work. Practice refactoring until it’s second nature before calling it “too much effort.” Try continuous integration as a team before discarding it as overhead. The road to agility goes through technical mastery, which gives us the freedom to decide based on impact — not convenience.
Kent Beck, the creator of XP, wrote that “XP is a discipline of software development.” Discipline implies consistency and accountability. You can’t skip parts of a process until you’ve fully understood what they do and what problems they solve. This applies to practices, ceremonies, tools, and frameworks. Learn before adapting. Practice before judging.
Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean — each of these frameworks holds years of insights, challenges, and evolution. They offer different paths, but all share the core idea of iterating based on feedback, delivering value continuously, and improving as we learn. When we commit to practices with clarity and honesty, we create environments of trust where learning happens and change is sustainable.
If we want our clients to trust our delivery, we need to show technical maturity and business empathy. It’s possible to build software with agility without sacrificing quality. It’s possible to be productive without rushing. And yes, it’s possible to challenge a framework — as long as we know what we’re doing and why.
Delivering value starts with asking good questions. What are we trying to solve? How will we know it worked? What did we learn from what we shipped yesterday? Agility thrives not when we look for shortcuts, but when we commit to building thoughtful, resilient paths.
True agility isn’t about doing things faster — it’s about doing the right things with more clarity and purpose.