There are not that many people who like micromanagement. No surprise that the fear of day to day micromanagement scares some people off the agile processes. That is not the only way agile processes can look micromanaging. All the agile processes employ the idea of iterative and incremental planning on pretty much every possible level. Scrum Product Owners can change the project priorities every 14-30 days, in Extreme Programming, the usual iteration length is just one week. Naturally the possibility for the rapid shifts in the priorities can make it difficult for the team to design and build a good architecture and work at a full possible speed.

There are quite many people to whom agile processes look like a lot of micromanagement: developers have to report on their actions every single day, management picks its nose to every feature, wants the team to report with demos every two-four weeks and has problems allowing to spend a couple of months on thinking through and building a good architecture. Sounds like micromanagement, doesn't it?

Micromanagement devils