> But Agile to me always seemed to be about management being able to absolve itself of all responsibility for not being able to figure out what to build or how to build it and to always be able to blame the engineers.
This is Agile’s “Executive Armor Effect”, which turns developers into a sort of ablative armor that can take hits for executives.
Let me say this about agile: the most important part of a software project is the first 20% of it, when all the foundations and building blocks for the application have to be created.
What I’ve seen happening at the dozen or so different scrum places I’ve worked at is that agile abrogates this first critical 20%, and more than anything this is what makes agile so destructive to software projects.