To you and me, yes, that's a true statement. To the business, it's not. Being "responsive to change" means we're constantly polishing the turds the CTO-adjacent crowd has laid, and we do no service to ourselves by pretending otherwise, or trying to reclaim the language of "agile".
You seem to have an emotional issue linking those concepts. They are all different things. But yeah, lying about what you do is harmful too. The top management not wanting to solve real problems or making real products is about as bad as any other kind of management failure.
Hey, I wanted to thank you for this comment. I was really tilted yesterday about adjacent issues and was inadvertently bringing that here. Your comment made me take a step back, look at what I was posting, and stop posting while I was emotional.
Thank you.
Agile is about being responsive to changes. And yeah, the bad specifications are included. Anybody that makes it about volume of work is dishonest (but I do agree that's the norm).
We should not let dishonest people bastardize our language to the point we can't communicate. And the most obvious way to fight back is to call them on their lies.
(And yeah, it's implicit but it's very clear that agile is supposed to decrease the volume of work. You can't decide to optimize for something else and not suffer there.)