[wpietri]

Well, a lot of places that are "doing Agile" (whatever that means) are really just doing waterfall with some different rituals and labels. E.g., the 30-minute standing status meeting, which has nothing in common with the Extreme Programming stand-up meeting except that people are standing. (Sometimes. I've seen places where they do the daily "stand-up" sitting down.)

If you're working in a place with a screwed-up culture, a daily stand-up will make a number of the dysfunctions obvious. Removing the meetings doesn't make things better, it just makes the problems subtler, and therefore harder to fix.

Anyhow, I also see plenty of places that make this work well.