Oh, I’ve read all that. But I feel like there’s two agile methodologies - one that the authors intended, a lightweight adaptive attitude where you ground out your process based on what works with your team. And then there’s Agile: The Process as prescribed by agile consultants who go to agile seminars. This agile insists on daily standup, point based estimation, velocity tracking, jira (for some reason), etc. Otherwise you are Doing Agile Wrong, and you will be cast off the holy mountain.

I get the sense the authors of agile used words like “scrum” because they imagine software development like a full contact sport; where everyone is fully engaged with all their senses to truly be aware of what’s happening, what’s needed and what is the most important thing to work on. The cargo culting agile consultant approach always feels like an attempt to make software into a repeatable assembly line, and make software engineers into factory workers.

Fair enough, but that's just really shitty consultants. These days practitioners (the ones I run into anyway) are quite conscious of process overhead. It helps that many are into Lean as well.

FWIW, shitty agile consultants have had plenty of pushback too, with comedy sites like https://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/ being set up to point out their buffoonery. I do suggest laughing in their faces when they pull out tripe like that. Sometimes their excuse is, 'well, we don't work for a startup, we're a regulated business' -- well, it's still tripe, there are plenty of regulated businesses with lightweight agile processes.

My favourite piece of writing on this, in fact, comes from the US Defense Innovation Board, and is called "Detecting Agile BS"[1]. Their recommendations may not 100% work for your organization, and that's okay -- tailor it with an eye to outcomes for your team.

[1] https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/09/2002049591/-1/-1/0/DIB...