There was a big push for Agile in my old group at Microsoft (no names here). It was basically micromanagement. I saw hours-long, daily meetings by PMs and mana

There was a big push for Agile in my old group at Microsoft (no names here). It was basically micromanagement. I saw hours-long, daily meetings by PMs and managers who were digging into the "velocity" of individual developers. They would still add and remove work mid-sprint, and generally treated estimates hard commitments rather than, well, estimates. You'd get a talkin' to if they thought you were behind. Mgt: "We need that Frobicle system done in a week." Me: "What. This is mid-sprint. You're changing things up? And what the heck is Frobicle?" Mgt: "Don't care. Our estimate is a week, go do it." Me: "Repeat: What is a Frobicle? Is there a spec? Someone I can talk to? What color is it? Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?" Mgt: "A week." Our mandated daily stand-up was actually just a PM getting the team together in a hallway while he polled us and wrote down our status, grist for those aforesaid meetings. I got our PM to say, "Time for status" instead of "Time for standup" because the meeting was useless to our team. Eventually I just stopped going, and a few other developers did, too. We were doing our own scrums, informally and as we needed them. Naturally there was still crunch time. I'm actually okay with that, as long as management doesn't try to deny that crunch time is happening, and limits the damage to people and the organization, and doesn't do it continuously. A bit of crunch every six months to a year is fine, while a crunch at the end of every sprint is NOT, and that's where things were headed about the time I left. Agile brings out the worst in management.