management is very creative, they just sometimes don't realize that agile is not a management process, it's an engineering process. it's an easy mistake to make because they want to measure engineering output somehow and introduce measurements which cause decoherence of the engineering process state if I may use a quantum analogy instead of a car one.

IOW they're trying to do their jobs (manage employees) but engineering is a high trust profession and some managers just don't have the trust (not to say that all engineers have the integrity...)

> At the hands of an uncreative person any tool will be the wrong tool. This is what people fail time and time again to understand.

I think most commenters on HN understand this.

But then what problem does capital-A Agile solve? It was meant to surface problems faster and empower people in teams, and benefit the customer, avoiding waste and nasty surprises. Yet we've seen enough horror stories in these past decades to understand Agile (Scrum et al) can fail just just as often and is as prone to mismanagement and meddling as the methods it was meant to replace.

It takes a strong team (leadership and stakeholders included) to make Agile work and reap its benefits. But such a strong team will probably work well with whatever methodology -- strong teams are effective regardless.

What about average teams, which Agile was supposed to be helping? In my experience, they'll fail just as often.

A method that works for a team of focused superheroes is not really applicable to the general population of developers.