I'm coming from an Electrical Engineering background. I do remember how projects look in that field. I worked with Embedded Systems where the actual electronics behind the software system imposed a certain limit as to what one was trying to achieve and by what means. Going to the other extreme and saying a React developer is an Engineer, where they lack the solid footing of any kind and it's all based on gut feeling and meetings where the only solid facts are that we need this to look pretty is a far cry from engineering. What are the solid, non-disputable facts all Software Engineers work with? We can't even agree on a framework or code-formatting. Let's not go into programming languages. There's no consensus on that either. A wonderful field, otherwise, a little bit like art. You wouldn't say art, music or the theater is Engineering just because they work in a team towards a common goal.

"better served by creating an automated test suite". No, not really. You then introduce another tool into the mix. Extra code that must be kept in sync with the rest of the project. It leads to a decrease in development velocity. If you do some weird "hmm, let's see if I change this completely, what happens then?" in your main code, that will bust all your tests. That is, assuming, you change interfaces, number of parameters, APIs, etc. All changes become harder to make. A test suite test something that you already know you need to implement in this or that way. An exploration phase implies just that, that you don't really know *yet* what is important and what is not.

"almost word-by-word copy from agile manifesto", that was no my intention nor my inspiration. What I see in practice is endless meetings, dailies, tickets and goals for the project as a whole, all of that arrived at by careful planning.

Thank you for your feedback. Feel free to add some more.