Agile as a micromanagement tool
published on 2024/01/30
On the other hand, there are parts of Agile that I believe to be unnecessary and even harmful. There are parts of Agile practices which were brought up with good intentions, but seem to have pernicious effects in the long term. From my observation, in a lot of use cases, Agile seems to devolve into a micromanagement tool, especially under clueless management who don't have any proper technical background.
I am also going to make the claim that Agile’s championing of the constant intermingling between business and engineering people usually results in the business people dominating the engineering folks. In a healthy organization, the engineering teams need to have a certain level of autonomy in order to do their jobs right. They need to be able to push back on the business interests to defend software quality as necessary. From what I have observed, Agile seems to frequently hinder engineering autonomy and therefore software quality.