Flaccid agile

Flaccid agile is a term coined by Martin Fowler to describe a common dysfunction in organizations that adopt so-called agile methodologies that do not embrace the underlying technical practices and principles of the agile manifesto of software development. These organizations tend to focus on the process and ceremonial aspects of project management frameworks like Scrum, while neglecting the technical excellence advocated by software development frameworks like Extreme Programming (XP).

The term refers to teams that follow Agile’s project management rituals — such as sprints, stand-ups, and backlogs — but neglect core engineering disciplines like continuous integration, test-driven development, refactoring, and maintaining a clean codebase. The result is a team that appears to be "doing agile" on the surface while accumulating significant technical debt beneath it, and so finding that their ability to respond to change – one of agile’s central promises – actually degrades over time as the codebase becomes increasingly difficult to modify safely.