ServiceNow recently announced that Agile 2.0 will soon reach its end-of-sale milestone and has been officially marked for deprecation. For many development teams, this module has been more than just a tool; it has been the primary engine for managing sprints, stories, and epics for years.
Understanding the roadmap for this transition is essential for maintaining operational continuity and alignment with ServiceNow’s modern architectural standards.
Agile 2.0: The main tool of many development teams
Agile 2.0 has long been established as one of the most effective tools for ServiceNow developers. The module provides comprehensive support for team sprints, allowing stories to be seamlessly categorised into products, epics, or themes. This functionality is consolidated into two primary workspaces: the Agile Board and the Scrum Program Planning Board.
Historically, it was unique as a module found in nearly every customer instance due to its availability as a free inclusion. Despite its ubiquity, its configuration varied significantly between organisations, offering a tailored experience for developers, Agileists, Scrum Masters, and Product Owners alike. This created a “drinking your own champagne” environment, where implementers were simultaneously the primary end-users of the product.
Agile 2.0 is the culmination of 15 years of iterative refinement. The following timeline illustrates its evolution from a basic life cycle tool to the current enterprise solution:
- October 2010 – Fall 2010: Initial Release of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), the ancestor of Agile Development. A separate plugin (SDLC – SCRUM) could be installed to add sprints and stories.
- July 2012 – Berlin: SDLC integration with project management (to help manage Agile Software projects)
- May 2016 – Helsinki: SDLC focuses on the Scrum methodology and is rebranded ‘Agile Development’.
- June 2017 – Jakarta: Agile Development 2.0 Release (replacing Agile Development)
- March 2020 – Paris: Agile Development 2.0 mobile App (has anyone used this?)
- February 2023 – Vancouver: Next Experience support (for the better looks)
- March 2024 – Washington: GenAI integration (Now Assist) to help write and process stories.
- November 2025 – Zurich: Agile 2.0 is marked for deprecation
The deprecation roadmap
While the term “deprecation” can cause concern, the transition is structured to allow existing customers ample time to pivot.
The timeline is as follows:
- January 2026 (end of sale): New subscriptions to the Agile 2.0 SKU will no longer be possible.
- Q3 2026 (end of renewal): This marks the final opportunity for existing subscribers to renew their Agile 2.0 contracts.
- Q3 2029 (full deprecation): Based on standard three-year contract cycles, the application will be fully deprecated once the final active contracts expire (approx. Q3 2029).
Once deprecated, the module will remain functional but will be treated as custom code. ServiceNow will no longer provide enhancements, upgrades, or technical support for the module.
Allegedly, companies using Agile 2.0 efficiently and having a strong in-house development team will not be significantly affected, as they can keep maintaining the module as-is themselves.
The next chapter: EAP & CWM
ServiceNow is directing customers toward two primary successors designed to offer greater flexibility and better user experiences:
1. Collaborative Work Management (CWM)
ServiceNow CWM is a versatile product, either available as a standalone or included within the SPM Package. It is aimed at single-team agile planning or siloed teams.
It provides ‘Boards‘ that you can share with your team and in which you can freely add:
- tasks (linked or not with other artefacts within the platform)
- ‘custom’ columns (up to 100 per board)
- automations (Mini business rules. Eg: send a mail, change a value, etc.)
- Docs (free text zones, think One Note)
- And it even has its own tiny Gantt chart
CWM also completely revamps ‘My Work’ and makes it much more user friendly than the list view previously available.
In summary, CWM wants to take everything that made Agile 2.0 work great for Devs, and make it available for the business too. Everything is much more user friendly and accessible, even without prior knowledge of ServiceNow.
And if you want to become pro at CWM, the Now Learning training is already available HERE.
In the upcoming releases (planned for March 2026), ServiceNow teased a lot of interesting additional features, such as:
- Formula Columns to automatically calculate totals, metrics, etc.
- Dependencies between the tasks, made visible by colored lines in a Kanban view.
- Scrum Task automatically generated from stories (using NowAssist)
- An OOB direct integration with SPM’s Project Workspace to send the project tasks straight to a team’s CWM board.
2. Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP)
Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) will be the recommendation for anyone wanting to work in a ‘Team of Teams’ structure. That is leveraging multiple teams, all with their own workload and capacity, towards a single objective.
Any organisation that either has a single development team or siloed teams that barely interact with one another will be better off focusing on Collaborative Work Management.
Of course, like most of the modules in ServiceNow, both work very well together, and their features are mostly integrated.
Last but not least, ServiceNow provided a pretty nice summarisation of where you should focus your efforts on depending on whether you are currently using Agile 2.0 or not, and whether you work with single teams or with teams of teams.
Organisations can begin the migration today by utilising the connected work feature, which allows CWM boards to manage existing stories from Agile 2.0. ServiceNow has indicated that automated migration tools are expected in the near future.
If you have any questions or need guidance, reach out to our team and we will be happy to start a discussion.