We were a few weeks away from a launch. I had sat down with our designer and we made a list together of about 30 changes we needed to make (“this is the wrong blue. This is 2px too big. Etc). The product owner wanted me to put all the changes through our normal process - make a jira issue for each one and we can do task estimation as a team and assign them, and so on. But most of them were tasks that would take a few minutes at most. (Some of the problems I fixed live while working with the designer). Our launch deadline was fast approaching and it would have taken more time to write a good jira ticket than it would to fix most of the issues - let alone discussing them as a group to estimate. While arguing he ended up showing his cards by admitting that the main reason he wanted everything in jira was for reporting. How else would upper management know that we were making progress? I said that sounded like his job, not mine. And he begrudgingly agreed and took my plain text list and dutifully retyped everything one by one into jira tickets. And then marked them all complete a week later when I’d fixed them all.

I think that experience killed the last bit of respect I had for Agile as a methodology - at least as it’s practiced in the wild. If we were using something lighter - like trello - I don’t think I would have resisted so much.