To the layperson, puffery seems like a license to lie, which, frankly, isn’t totally wrong. A well-known book on torts by William Prosser and W. Page Keeton stated it this way: “The puffing rule amounts to a seller’s privilege to lie his head off so long as he says nothing specific, on the theory that no reasonable man would believe him or that no reasonable man would be influenced by such talk.” In other words, the courts generally see puffery as “an expression of opinion and not a statement of fact.” in IEEE Computer, "Puncturing Pernicious Project Pufferies," Robert N. Charette, May 2018.
When we read unsubstantiated claims like those found in some agile outlets, this quote should remind us that those are expressed opinions and NOT statements of Fact, based on any recognizable principle of managing software in the presence of uncertainty.
For example - It's just puffery to suggest that decisions can be made in the presence of uncertainty without estimates of the probability of those uncertainties, the risks created by those uncertainties, the efficacy of the corrective or preventive actions to manage those risks, and the residual risk after those corrections or preventions.
