Most people outside the Agile communities, and sometimes within the community as well, think that Agile practices mean less control and more freedom for developers to do whatever they want. To some extent this is true since Agile practices prescribe self-organizing, autonomous teams that pull activities to do rather than accepting accepting activities pushed to them.
Looking at Agile methods and practices the focus is always on transparency, collaboration and trust between all parties. Combining that with every persons ambition to look good to his/her peers there are actually some very powerful tools to use, such as dashboards and reports. Therefore, transparency management is very important and must be connected to a vision/mission statement which needs to be accomplished.
Using the analogy with infrastructure for traffic. It is essential that there are roads and feedback systems to guide drivers. Nobody directs people how/where to drive, it is up to the individual but in order to get to the destination safely and as fast as desired, the driver need to leverage existing infrastructure the best way possible. Likewise in software development, the teams/individuals do have freedom to a large extent but they have to stick within existing infrastructure such as testing, environment provisioning and reporting. If they do not, they will not be able to deliver real value and their peers will look at them in a negative way.
