Agreed. Agile needs to be for developers first and foremost, not the management.
At least, in Scrum, from my experience so far: pointing is about measuring the uncertainty to delivery, but should healthily include learning, tech debt refactors,testing, q/a, even unexpected stuff like dev churn (i.e shoot under always, over estimate slightly).
But if individual performance is measured by velocity and points, you will just get devs badly cutting corners and gaming it while project & product will never get accurate measurements they can tie time based business outcomes to (especially as you get further out and short term corner cutting starts to rear it's head as brutal Tech Debt and time sinks)
At least, in Scrum, from my experience so far: pointing is about measuring the uncertainty to delivery, but should healthily include learning, tech debt refactors,testing, q/a, even unexpected stuff like dev churn (i.e shoot under always, over estimate slightly).
But if individual performance is measured by velocity and points, you will just get devs badly cutting corners and gaming it while project & product will never get accurate measurements they can tie time based business outcomes to (especially as you get further out and short term corner cutting starts to rear it's head as brutal Tech Debt and time sinks)