While its goal is to "empower" developers to build usable things quickly, Agile/Scrum is often used by management to give themselves insight into development pr

While its goal is to "empower" developers to build usable things quickly, Agile/Scrum is often used by management to give themselves insight into development progress. And because its not a "fixed" process and is inherently malleable, the way it gets implemented is usually to serve management first and developers second. A perfect example of this is the misuse of things like story points. It's supposed to be a reference as to how complicated a task is to complete. Ideally, over time, management gets a sense of how many "story points" a team can complete in a sprint. In practice however, development teams basically get brow-beat into treating story points as shorthand for how long they think something will take. So for example, something that involves a bunch of basic drudgery that has no real impact on the system gets scored high. Whereas some minor change deep in the bowels of the system that breaks a cascade of tests and causes massive regressions gets scored low because hey its only 5 lines of code!