Slides from my keynote at the Global Scrum Gathering. Vancouver, May 5, 2026.


Scrum Doesn’t Matter — keynote slides preview
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When I walked out on stage, before I said a word about my talk, I asked the audience two live questions:

  • “How important is Scrum/Agile to you?” Average: 3.5 out of 5.
  • “How important is Scrum/Agile to your CEO?” Average: 2.4 out of 5.

That gap — between how much we care and how much our CEOs care — is the whole talk.

Business people never cared about Scrum. They care about results. Our job is to deliver the results. That’s what makes Scrum, XP, and the practices this community has championed for decades more important than ever — especially now that AI can amplify all of it.

A random dude in Bilbao

A few years ago, I was at dinner in Bilbao. I started chatting with the guy at the next table about what I do for a living, and he said this:

“Agile is a terrible way to build software. And it’s the only way that actually works.”

I laughed. He was right. After decades of writing software, coaching teams, teaching it at Harvard, and going back to writing software again as CTO of Alli Connect, I think that’s the most honest sentence I’ve ever heard about our craft.

That random dude in Bilbao gave me the title of my keynote.

The data that surprised me

I shared production data from four years of building Alli Connect, three repos, three eras of how I worked:

  • Era A — Me solo, no AI: baseline output. Call it one Richard.
  • Era B — Me + a senior developer, gradually adding AI: two Richards.
  • Era C — Me solo with AI as my pair: three Richards — at half the cost of Era B.

Solo + AI beat pair + AI on my codebase. The AI partner costs less than 1% of a human developer. That scared me. It might also mean any of us in this community can launch new things that used to be out of reach.

What’s actually in the slides

  • Sneaky Scrum (still works in 2026)
  • The DORA fundamentals — and why they matter more with AI, not less
  • Why I’m questioning pair programming and TDD now (with data)
  • Jeff Sutherland’s all-AI agent teams (one-hour sprints, 61 stories a day)
  • The formula: AI-assisted Scrum + AI-assisted XP/CD/DORA + Core Protocols
  • A few things I changed my mind about

What the audience took home

The most-picked answer when I asked “what’s your key takeaway?” was — by a wide margin — “the fundamentals still matter.”

That’s the whole talk in five words. The provocative title is bait. The fundamentals matter more than ever.

Three things you can do this week

  1. Stop using Scrum jargon with your CEO. Don’t say “sprint #173.” Say “the week ending May 8.” Same practice, zero alien talk.
  2. Pick one DORA metric — cycle time is the easiest. Measure for two weeks. Try one practice. Measure again. Keep what helps.
  3. Come practice with me. I organize the Global Coding Dojo the second Wednesday of every month. Free, online, all skill levels — TDD, mob programming, AI-assisted coding.

Ask me for help

This is one of the Core Protocols: if you’re stuck, ask. Anyone, any time.

If something in this talk landed for you — or if you want to argue with me about pair programming, or TDD, or whether AI changes everything — email me at richard@kasperowski.com. I mean it.