The problem with Agile’s two-week iterations (or “sprints”) and user stories is that there is no exit strategy. There’s no “We won’t have to do this once we achieve [X]” clause. It’s designed to be there forever: the business-driven engineering and status meetings will never go away. Architecture and R&D and product development aren’t part of the programmer’s job, because those things don’t fit into atomized “user stories” or two-week sprints. As a result, the sorts of projects that programmers want to take on, once they master the basics of the craft, are often ignored, because it’s annoying to justify them in terms of short-term business value. Technical excellence matters, but it’s painful to try to sell people on this fact if they want, badly, not to be convinced of it.
Source: Michael O. Church – Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible