[RamblingCTO]

Yes, I got that! That's why I used "agile" as well. My first thought was that it might be true what they said because it might be harder to account for said work, but I think in the end it depends on the management style and the priorities. If management and the dev team don't have the right priorities, traditional or agile can't do anything about it. And the technology leader (i.e. a CTO/tech lead etc.) needs to protect devs from pressure and stress of stakeholders and users. You need to foster understanding that developing software takes time and things like proper testing, QA, security, refactoring, updating libs etc. saves you money and allows you to keep the momentum. That's the job of the CTO imho. Also: if you want to move faster, grow your team (and your structures) and see where time is wasted (we don't have a lot of meetings for devs that are mandatory besides demo, sprint planning, retro and standups and all have a max time) and don't cut corners all the time, they are coming back to bite you most of the time.

If anyone's interested, I can only recommend "Scrum and XP from the trenches"!

/e: sorry for the long text, tl;dr: have the right priorities to produce good software, agile is not the cause, your shitty management is