Chores, Habits, and Rituals by Mark Stone

June 2025. Agile is often described as having a lot of ceremonies. We use the word "ceremony" because ceremonies are where rituals are performed. But what is a ritual in software development?

As a teenager I hated yard work - mowing, raking, weeding. Especially weeding out the bed for my dad's vegetable garden. It was a chore. The more I made excuses and put it off, the larger a chore it became, making me ever less inclined to tackle the work. I never really asked why growing vegetables in a suburban backyard was important to my dad; couldn't you just buy vegetables at the store?

A few years later my grandparents' health declined, and they sold the 100 acre farm that was all I had ever known of them. A few years after that they passed. Only then did I start to feel all the little things in my life that their lives had touched, and how I missed them. Decades later, after moving into a house of my own, I took to yard work like an adult, not a teenager. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I got some satisfaction from it, and I knew by making it a habit that it would never become a chore too large to bear.

One year, without much thought as to why, I started planting vegetables in a couple of beds in the back yard. I'm not very good at it. But I'm diligent about it. And I learn from year to year. Better soil aeration. More crop rotation. The difference between watering and over-watering. What has emerged is a sense of awe and nostalgia for my grandparents, my grandfather especially, who seemed like he could grow anything. I meditate on his memory as I plant, weed, harvest, and compost. Even the weeds look different now. After all, what really is the difference between a weed, a wildflower, and a flower? The attention we give something changes how we view it. What was once a chore has now become a ritual.

We have ceremonies in agile because, at a minimum, we need our teams to move from chores to habits. Acceptance criteria. Code reviews. Unit tests. User validation. All of these are investments of time now that will save work later, or even more important, reveal work now that doesn't need to be done at all. Good agile teams understand the efficiency gained by investing in habits. Great agile teams understand the value of mindful habits that become rituals. That's how sustainable software development flourishes.

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