I think a really great example of this is the "One Minute Manager" and similar management books on the market. They try to give you rules for managing the peop

I think a really great example of this is the "One Minute Manager" and similar management books on the market. They try to give you rules for managing the people you work with, without considering the human / personal element of the job. I have known people with managers like these, and they always fail. People catch on pretty quickly. One of the good trends in software (IMO) is that in rejecting rule-driven ways of running projects (like waterfall, RUP, etc.), people across the industry have basically agreed that the right way to build software is to make it a human endeavor again, thus Agile, XP, etc. The bad trend I see is that some people are trying to create rule-driven systems out of Agile and XP (e.g. 99% unit test coverage required, or you must pair program every line of code in the system). This makes my head hurt, since it is so against the spirit of the Agile manifesto.