Agile development seems to be the ‘in’ thing for software development firms today. Everyone has their daily standup meeting, scrum masters, sprints, and so forth. But does it really bring any true value to software development? I don’t think so. In fact, I have taken to calling it fragile development. Why would I say that about such a beloved idea? Because my experience is that it creates horrible software. Sprint after sprint, developers work to output code often without knowing the big picture. Day after day, short-sighted development goals are pushed so you get enough points done and complete everything for the sprint. Managers now have even more ability to micromanage since everything has to be done at the end of the sprint and everyone has to report in with their daily progress. Time is wasted in meeting after meeting that brings little if any actual value to the team. What does all this mean? It means that developers are always under the gun to output code quickly so it’s done for this sprint. This causes developers to take the short path instead of analyzing things more thoroughly since such analysis would take more than the allotted points and may push things off schedule. Developers are never able to try new things because failure is not an option — points must get done and software must be pushed. Software engineers never have an opportunity to practice engineering skills or architect larger systems because everything is broken down into bite-sized pieces without any real worry about how it all fits together. To make it worse, important technological changes and refactoring get pushed to the bottom of the list since they do not have an immediately visible benefit for the organization. In the end, developers never grow or develop, code stagnates, and poor software becomes the norm. Sprint after sprint turns into a death march for features, bugs never get fixed (unless they bring immediate business value), and the expertise of senior developers is ignored in favor of short-sighted business objectives. If you want quality software, leave engineers do what they do, give them the latitude to make the necessary decisions to create the product you want. Qualified engineers are more than capable of creating awesome software — why hinder them?