ethin parent
Hot take but I seriously think both Agile/Scrum and "make a single dev do a ton of things that wouldn't necessarily count as software development" (like RDB design and management) is the direct cause of all of these problems. It is my opinion that Agile/scrum (or, at least, the "agile"/"scrum" that corporations understand) institutionalized the "move fast, break things, consolidate everything into as few positions as possible" mindset, in the name of things like "reducing expenditures" and "ship things really fast and damn the consequences". That includes, oh, I dunno, dumping QA/QC and putting all of that on the end-users. Maybe the real Agile might not do this, but I can't say because, from what I know, very few, if any, corporations actually use the real Agile at all, and instead repurpose the word to mean a completely different system.
While I largely agree, I do think a more significant portion of the problems are caused by Nadella's claims of 30% ML-generated code. If true (as a peddler of ML, there are many reasons for him not to be truthful) the is a rather strong inverse correlation of quality with these announcements and layoffs.
Furthermore, with modern MBAs at the helm, the concern is only pumping figures for the next quarter - five years be damned.
It's also completely possible to do agile with QA. One place I worked had 1 QA per 3 devs, and they were able to maintain a single (2 week) sprint behind cadence.
Scrum was always how Agile was sold to behemoths. It necessarily makes several compromises that deeply undermine it.
Anti-agile is the operational ideology of those who will conquer the future. :')
agile is a mixed bag with some quite good ideas and practices, but imo the main selling point for industry is that it allows complete dillution of compromise and responsibility, and it shows. this is why companies have bought en masse into the snakeoil and imo that's the main reason for quality problems: follow these rituals (without any regard to the core concepts behind them) and everything will be fine, and if it doesn't it was not our fault, "change is inevitable and shit happens".
also, qa is simply not optional, and agile actually stresses that pretty strongly.