I would say Steve Yegge's classic Good Agile, Bad Agile gives the answer - Kanban (or, more informally, a work queue).
Because someone's paying you to do stuff, and they might like to know what's happening. The incredible rush of money into tech in the 2010s might have given the impression that that isn't a thing, but it is, and teams that can't self-manage (including giving visibility and predictability) are going to become encumbered with more and more people managers to compensate.
What they should be doing is understanding their role, making sure it's fulfilled, and then taking that cash that would be spent on managers and spending it on engineers instead. But that won't happen if they can't communicate, or can't even see a need for communication.
When I started SW development in 2005, we had one meeting a week (Friday) with our boss, where we summarized what progress we made during the week. It was exactly what he and his superiors needed to know, not anything more.
Not reporting. Reporting is an internal function. People would like to know what's happening and what's going to happen, so that they know roughly what to expect for planning purposes elsewhere in the business, e.g. marketing. Not just reporting for its own sake.
You need predictability, so that people who depend on your work can make future plans (and I'm not talking about promising the day of delivery, but simple "this week / this quarter / this year / probably never")
And yeah, Kanban is a good alternative, but the article does'nt mention it at all
