It feels easy to blame planning. If I take your interpretation, plans are checklist tasks or milestones for management to measure developer progress. At worst a

It feels easy to blame planning. If I take your interpretation, plans are checklist tasks or milestones for management to measure developer progress. At worst a plan can be something you create for someone else to flog you with it. These sort of plans are also by their nature almost always inaccurate to some degree. To my mind a good plan is one where it can provide context for an entire team about where and what (to some level of accuracy) needs to be done. Part of planning is to reduce the principle-agent type problems that come with software. Individual developers are responsible for their own plan and it isn't too constrained so at their own liberty people can swap or modify what they need to do without centralized agreement. Planning isn't easy, and I agree that sometimes the best plan for some types of work is to be very short term and iterative.