[DanielBMarkham]

Got a better one for you. Start doing the math on how much money you waste thinking you're smart and understand everything and then blow it later on because you missed a key conversation. I'll stack that up against nerf-ball-tossing any day of the week. Or how about useless status reports? (stand-ups are not status reports). Or meetings with required attendance that accomplish nothing?

Communication kills teams. That's why the 30-person team sucks -- communication difficulties expand at an exponential rate. Stand-ups, pair-programming, co-location,and all the rest of that are just feeble attempts to address this problem. If you don't like one of these things, stop it. But that doesn't make the underlying problem go away. Whatever you do, you have to constantly be figuring out ways to solve this problem, not just thinking you've got it nailed because you're doing X.

Agile is very simple. But if you try hard enough, and most teams do, you can screw it up.