Joshua Kerievsky is the creator of Modern Agile (approximately 2016), author of "Refactoring to Patterns" (2004), and founder of Industrial Logic — a training and consulting firm. His creation of Modern Agile represents one of the clearest articulations of the post-agile-era critique: that mainstream Agile, particularly in its enterprise-scaling incarnations, has become "a bloated tangle of enterprise tools, scaling frameworks, and questionable certificates" that obscures what actually matters.
"Refactoring to Patterns"
Kerievsky's 2004 book connected two influential traditions: Martin Fowler's refactoring catalog and the Gang of Four design patterns. The argument was that refactoring isn't just about cleaning code — it's about evolving code toward better-known design patterns when appropriate, and away from over-engineered patterns when they're unnecessary. The book established Kerievsky in the Agile technical practice community as a serious thinker about software design and the relationship between design and iterative development.
Modern Agile
Kerievsky introduced Modern Agile (approximately 2016) as an alternative to what he saw as the degraded state of mainstream Agile. The Modern Agile framework strips everything down to four principles:
This is a deliberate simplification — a response to frameworks like SAFe (safe-scaled-agile-framework) that Kerievsky saw as recreating exactly the overhead and complexity the Agile movement was supposed to eliminate. The modern-agile framework has no roles, no ceremonies, no artifacts — just the four principles.
The critique is pointed: Kerievsky argues that mainstream Agile became captured by the agile-industrial-complex — a certification and consulting industry that profits from complexity and prescription. Modern Agile is positioned as a return to first principles, compatible with the spirit of agile-manifesto-four-values while rejecting the accumulated methodology overhead.
Industrial Logic
Kerievsky founded Industrial Logic as a training and coaching organization focused on software development practices — particularly technical practices like refactoring, TDD, and evolutionary design. Industrial Logic's approach emphasizes learning through practice rather than through certification, positioning it against the certification-industrial complex that Kerievsky critiques.
Movement Role
Kerievsky occupies the critic-and-alternative-creator position in the post-agile-era discourse alongside figures like ryan-singer and dave-thomas. His modern-agile framework is among the most compact and principled alternatives to mainstream Agile frameworks. His critique is from within the tradition — he is not rejecting Agile values, but arguing that the movement has betrayed them through complexity, certification, and commercialization.