Because it was coopted by Scrum, driven by the the certification mill in an effort to monetize the Agile movement. So today people equate Scrum and Agile — which is horrifying.

And the Scrum community locked Agile into a set of models and practices that prevented the Agile community from evolving. Thus, organizations that had to scale Agile methods — Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc. — had to invent new paradigms, and DevOps was born. That caught the Scrum community (which was by then essentially the Agile community) off guard.

Today I turn to DevOps as the source of ideas — not the Agile community. The Agile community is too stuck in the Scrum legacy and the behavioral side of Agile. The technical side is immensely important. And we need to think end-to-end — not in terms of teams. DevOps provides models for that.

Unfortunately there is some cargo cult DevOps appearing, and DevOps is being corrupted by idea salesmen just as Agile was. We hear about “autonomous self-organizing teams”, which does not work at scale.

My advice: don’t trust any practice or principle that is peddled except for the fundamental ones. Think of the value streams as interacting systems. Think end to end. Use feedback looks to improve things in real time. Besides that, be skeptical of any extreme practice: extremes do not work. Autonomous self-organizing teams is a good example of that: it is an extreme and does not work. What works is mostly autonomous and mostly self-organizing teams: what “mostly” should mean depends on your products and your organization.