# An Opinion on Agile Practices, Meetings, Iterations, and Testing

DevFeed: [An Opinion on Agile Practices, Meetings, Iterations, and Testing](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/agile-is-poisonous-30292.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.mdubakov.com/posts/agile-is-poisonous/>)

Published: 2013-04-01T15:41:57Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Blog by Michael Dubakov](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/blog-by-michael-dubakov.md>)

Topics: [Agile](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/agile.md>), [meetings](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/meetings.md>), [Testing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/testing.md>), [Self-organizing Team](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/self-organizing-team.md>)

Tags: [agile](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agile.md>), [email](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/email.md>), [kanban](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kanban.md>), [meetings](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/meetings.md>), [productivity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/productivity.md>), [qa](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/qa.md>), [scrum](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scrum.md>), [unit-tests](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/unit-tests.md>)

## AI overview

An opinion article reviews a company's experience with agile development, including daily meetings, short iterations, testing, and Kanban. The author argues that several practices reduced productivity or failed to work in that company's context.

## Source excerpt

I don't believe in agile development anymore. Our company applied agile practices from day one. We've started agile usage in 2006. We tried almost everything: Extreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban and many many small practices. Did it stick? Hell no. Let's review the lessons. Daily Meetings They are just worthless. We used to gather together at 11 am in a single room and report what was completed, what is not, whether there are some blockers. Well, when there are about 30 people in a room these meetings are not fun. They took up to 10 minutes usually, but sometimes they took as long as 15 minutes (I think this duration just can't be tolerated). After the meeting, people go and grab coffee, chat about problems, chat about ideas... These useless activities distract people and they spend less time on coding. We've replaced daily meetings with a weekly status reports sending via email. The format is very simple with just 7 questions like "Please, enumerate all tasks you've completed last week" and "How you estimate your personal productivity on a scale from 1 (low) to 10 (exceptional)". We collect all emails, process them and have a real stats per person, per week, per project, etc. Really cool! Iterations We tried 1 week and 2 weeks iterations. Neither worked out. With short iterations there was a constant pressure to get shit done and technical debt accumulated like a huge garbage heap. It is impossible to squeeze a good solution into a short timeframe. There're so many meetings like iteration planning, planning poker sessions, iteration demo, iteration retrospective... These meetings are killing productivity, you know. QA were struggling with short iterations as well. It is impossible to test a user story thoroughly in few days. We tried mini-waterfall in a single iteration -- didn't work, testing phase started just 2 days till the end of the iteration with miserable outcome. We tried to write many unit tests and acceptance tests -- didn't help, since requirements were changi