As software engineers, it's our job to find exactly the right balance of quality and speed, and strategies to increase quality with no detriment to speed, for what is usually asked of software engineers.

Just like bridge and building engineers do not design those structures to stand up to 1000x the forces that they expect those structures will experience, software engineers need to learn to build with just the right level of complexity to quickly provide quality solution to a business need.

And that's where software engineers really struggle, and agile helps keep that in check, but in practice does not really improve quality. Software engineers should come up with ways to achieve quality with limited resources (just like engineers do everywhere else), and the best teams I worked in or with have!

Yes, we all know that, and every time somebody like me comes along and points out that agile basically sucks this line gets trotted out by somebody or other because that's not the way agile works in any company I've ever worked for.

"Let engineers build software the way they think they should," is an alien concept to all the businesses I've experienced. Now, as it happens, I don't necessarily think engineers should have the last word either, because I've seen too many people disappear down too many rabbit holes and not deliver anything valuable, but clearly agile is broken.

Build, test, file bugs, resolve bug. You can do this within any framework. Or, better, develop a high quality UI component library instead of asking a junior engineer to write CSS for correct checkbox handling.