That’s pretty much the entire promise of capital A Agile (Scrum, Safe etc). It provides a framework for people without any knowledge or passion for software dev

That’s pretty much the entire promise of capital A Agile (Scrum, Safe etc). It provides a framework for people without any knowledge or passion for software development to micromanage software engineers while ignoring agile principles and not bothering to conduct user research or to investigate product-market-fit or do anything else that might be worth doing other than creating extremely loose requirements they pulled out of the ether on a bi-weekly basis. The argument used to refute this is usually that people aren’t doing agile right and if only the people and companies were more competent and or did MORE Agile then things would be fine. Generally speaking successful tech companies don’t often put unskilled dispassionate middle managers in charge of software projects and don’t often use Agile processes Software development is a lot like photography. If your work sucks it’s because the engineer/photographer isn’t close enough to the subject/user/business goal. Agile tends to silo engineers away from their ideal motivations (users/business goals) in favour of meeting the needs of the egos of management. One case in point was a hedge fund who had increased their engineering team by a factor of 10 because they couldn’t get any work done after the Agile people took over. Their productivity had stabilised at a pre-agile /10 level. I was part of a group of consultants brought in to build them something because they were so unproductive. The consultancy’s solution was to do MORE Agile. So we ended up building a large but not very useful set of features instead of doing the smaller, more technically complex and much more useful feature. We completed the work on time only because of the generous bonuses offered to the outsourced developers. I believe it was unlikely to be worthwhile for the hedge fund.