Agile is not opposed to planning.

One of the biggest misunderstandings about the Manifesto for Agile Software Development is the interpretation of “responding to change over following a plan”.

Some take this to mean that planning is unnecessary or even discouraged. But that’s not what “over” means. “Over” does not mean “instead of”. It means “we value both, but we value the one on the right more”.

Planning is essential. As Eisenhower put it: “Plans are useless, but planning is everything”. The real danger isn’t planning itself, it’s planning in a way that resists change. If we can’t adapt based on new information, we lose the battle before it even begins.

I see a lot of people (CTOs included) who are still confused about this, so let’s say it again: QA does not mean final testers. Just like many others in the software engineering field, that’s a common fallacy.

A “QA professional” is not a manual tester sitting at the end of a production line, waiting to receive batches of work to validate from developers, acting as a go/nogo gate to production.