Test driven development to my knowledge is only mandated in one major Agile Framework, and that's eXtreme Programming. Individual Agile implementations may use TDD, but it is not mandated directly by the Agile Manifesto.

XP has a very low adoption rate (1% [1]) ; my guess is because it does things like mandate engineering approaches (TDD, pair programming, etc).

So to state that TDD causes Agile implementations to be more political than scientific, and therefore all Agile should be eliminated, is not 100% accurate (ignoring the assumption that TDD is more political than scientific)

[1] VersionOne's 8th annual state of agile survey. http://stateofagile.versionone.com/

I do agree too. Mainly because there is no real visibility of what is going on in between. The usual project management and tracking tools are an affidavit of the real process. Stand-up meetings are no different. There is hardly any real data of what happens in between the affidavits, with no measurement how do you know how you can do your job better as a team?