Why Doesn't The Agile Community Practice Empiricism?

"SAFe destroys autonomy", "estimation is a waste of time" and "Scrum Masters can't also be Product Owners" are just a few of the strong claims that are often made in our professional community.

But where is the evidence to support these bold claims? We sampled 50 posts with similar bold claims and found that only 3 offered *any* kind of evidence. Two of those were purely personal experiences. We also explored some actual research into these questions and found more nuanced results.

We wonder: why doesn't our community - that is all about empiricism - apply empiricism to itself and its claims? Why don't we gather actual objective evidence? Why do we allow each other to make bold claims that either lack evidence or aren't proportional to that evidence? Are we not harming our profession with this low bar?

In this episode, we discuss a professional crisis in our field. We also offer five things we can do to improve our profession. Ultimately, if we rely more on objective evidence we make a much stronger case for what we believe to be true. Or we may discover that our beliefs aren't actually true - which is a good thing too.

Read the transcript here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/why-doesnt-the-agile-community-practice-empiricism-12082e48ffba

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.