Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t
Warning: Unpopular opinion ahead.

Agile extremists love to dance around the broken record of: “but Agile is what ‘high-performing’ development teams use”.

Is it?

According to who?

What study?

What was the sample size?

How long was the study run?

What caliber of companies were included in the study?

Most importantly, what was the percentage increase in deliverability/speed/efficiency/developer happiness/customer happiness when using agile vs without?

These are questions the agile overlords either don’t know or refuse to provide the answer to.

Even if said studies exist (hint: quality ones don’t), those studies would likely have been conducted by statisticians who have never worked on a development team, thus making their study unqualified right out of the gate.

I don’t know what your definition of high-performance is but my definition would be along the lines of “delivering high-quality software quickly and efficiently”.

Now please explain to me what part about spending half the day in meetings rather than writing code is actually “high-performing”. There is a reason Elon Musk just fired half of Twitter. Sitting around in meetings all day [pretending it’s important](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sorry-your-job-doesnt-matter-what-matters-wayne-k-spear/) does not provide value. Clearly Elon is calling the bluff of all of the corporate shills who managed to convince company leaders that these meetings truly are important by firing everyone who sits around all day doing something other than writing code. He clearly put 44 billion dollars where his mouth is and told you that your pointless meetings don’t matter and they don’t need it to build quality software.

My previous company spent 1 hour every Wednesday talking about whatever urgent items needed to be addressed and then we peaced out for the rest of the week unless anything came up (in which case we would reach out to the person ad-hoc in Slack, rather than scheduling un-needed recurring weekly meetings)

My current company spends 4 out of 8 hours every day in meetings. These meetings include:

- Stand up
- Sprint planning
- Retrospective
- Refinement
- probably 5 others that I’m forgetting

I’m not an agile extremist so you’ll have to excuse me if I’ve gotten any of the their ridiculous verbiage wrong.

But let’s cut to the chase.

Someone explain to me:

Where within the definition of “high-performance” does taking 2 weeks and 4 meetings with 10 developers on each call just to deliver a simple list-filter feature fit in?

I ask because such a feature would have taken my previous non-agile team not more than 1 meeting and not more than 1 day to complete.

If team A takes 2 weeks and 4 meetings to deliver said feature and team B takes 1 day and 1 meetings to deliver said feature then simply put, team A needs to sit down and shut up as they hold no ground to talk about “high-performance”.

The time-tested adage of “put your money where your mouth is” holds true no matter how many agile verbiages you want to throw at it or how many agile-non-believers you scream obscenities in the face of.

Below is an open challenge to any person or organization:

Have your agile team deliver high-quality software more quickly and efficiently than my non-agile team and I will print out this post and eat it on camera.

Until then: sit down and shut up.