I think a lot of engineers say they want agile and they mean it in the sense of the ideals in the Agile Manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemani

I think a lot of engineers say they want agile and they mean it in the sense of the ideals in the Agile Manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/). There isn't a lot to complain about with those ideals. Working software, people, collaboration and flexibility are all very good things. When you look at the agile frameworks that are commonly implemented (Scrum, XP, etc.) you see that however well-intentioned they are, they seldom live up to those ideals. Do we care about working software or hitting burn down numbers? Do we care about flexibility or about keeping our iteration plans nice and clean? Do we care about collaboration or about having a paper trail to cover ourselves? Do we care about people or tickets? As agile has gone mainstream more and more experiences are bad, courtesy of Sturgeon's Law. Then you add in the fact that the bad experiences will always be amplified (after all, when things are working well they're "fine"; it's still work).