They're forgetting it because they want to forget it.
Businessmen want (for reasons that are somewhat rational) to commoditize everything, including labor. Programming labor has been stubbornly difficult to commoditize. Programmers differ in skill in very deep and complex ways, and can't just be swapped out like assembly line workers.
This is immensely frustrating to the bean counters. Anything that comes along and promises to allow programmers to become commodities is going to catch on like wildfire. The desire is too strong from a management perspective. It doesn't matter how many times such efforts have failed in the past. What's old will become new again.
The point of Agile (and Scrum) is to give responsibility back to the clients/managers: pick one -> time or money, you can't have both; we'll show you why from our user-stories, cards, task-boards, poker-game, scrum planning, etc.
Exactly, this is what "calibration" and "velocity" are about. But the elephant in the corner of the room is that skill still matters, you can't swap a good team for a bad one and get the same velocity. In fact it makes the management problem harder; now you don't just need "a hacker" but a whole team...
Agile theory does make some nods to not commodifying the programmers labor and giving programmers autonomy. But when it's sold the bean counters, they filter for the parts that get them what they want.
Not to mention that it appears to eliminate the long "measuring before you cut" thing at the start of new projects. Fingers on keyboards equals productivity!
Businessmen want (for reasons that are somewhat rational) to commoditize everything, including labor. Programming labor has been stubbornly difficult to commoditize. Programmers differ in skill in very deep and complex ways, and can't just be swapped out like assembly line workers.
This is immensely frustrating to the bean counters. Anything that comes along and promises to allow programmers to become commodities is going to catch on like wildfire. The desire is too strong from a management perspective. It doesn't matter how many times such efforts have failed in the past. What's old will become new again.