Agile doesn't have sprints.

Scrum has sprints. And Scrum is all about solving management problems not developer problems.

You can just drop sprints without replacing them with anything.

I'm sorry, but; no.

Developers aren't the only part of a product team.

You can't just drop sprints without failing to meet other objectives.

Sprints aren't the only method of agreeing objectives. You can just say "we plan on getting this done by next Wednesday".

I've dropped sprints on 2 teams now, and improved our cadence both times.

It's wholly dependent on the larger organisation.

If you need to demo to gain stakeholder approval, and provide ceremonies like retros to disseminate knowledge to a wider team .. these events need scheduling.

Randomly springing these on people without any regularity just won't work in most orgs.

sizing all your projects so they neatly fit in 2-week chunks also never works for every dev team I've met. There's always either some slack where the thing took 8 days not 10, or some part of the deliverable gets hacked off into another chunk so it fits.

and, ofc, estimating the time to deliver is impossible, so you end up scheduling a sprint demo that might or might not happen depending on how well the project is going.

Or, as I found, people are perfectly OK with scheduling demos in at short notice and being flexible about their expectations.

The project doesn't need to fit into 2-weeks!?

I'd suggest thinking this over, and revisiting.

I find some kind of Agile is potentially a pleasant way of handling development work. I have a couple of serious reservations in practice:

1. Part of the charm of Agile is that the devs set their own workload. That sounds empowering, but they can become like their own hyper-tyrannical manager, setting themselves unachievable workloads; that is, they become a proxy for bad management.

2. Managers can easily screw it up. For example, by wedging all projects into the same daily scrum, which then drags on for an hour; by participating in the scrum AT ALL, if they aren't doing dev work (they're supposed to be observers); by changing tasks mid-sprint, etc.

TBH I think the term 'agile' should be shunned. It's become a marketing buzzword, and has almost completely detached itself from the Agile Manifesto. If I were farming-out some dev work, and the proposal included something like "We use agile methodologies", that would raise a red flag for me.

>You don't like sprints or backlogs? Okay. So what's the alternative?

Apparently it's a team who can remember everything they discuss and plan between themselves.