In the agile community we love fast. Fast feedback, fast delivery. Fast is good. Slow is bad. Why then is the most common complaint I get about agile - "All this team stuff distracts me from writing code. We can't deliver fast if I can't write code". That's a good point. We are taking our devs away from coding to some extent. In an agile team they can’t just sit down in a corner with their headphones on and just cut code solidly for a week. There's a lot of team interaction that has to go on to make the team run smoothly.

So are we, by doing agile, slowing down delivery of code? Quite possibly yes. But what about fast delivery? How can we say we are about delivering fast but slow down the people who are actually delivering the code? The thing is, we don't actually deliver code. If we just delivered code we would go out of business. What we deliver is working, tested, fit for purpose code. More fundamentally than that, what we deliver is business value, not code. Agile is all about speeding the delivery of value, not the delivery of code.

The key to Agile and Lean methodologies is “the rapid delivery of customer value”. Anything that does not add value is considered waste. In Agile, value is often defined as “working code” but this is too narrow a definition. It assumes that the only stakeholders that matter are the end users of the software and that the only product the team needs to produce is the software.

In reality, the team is unlikely to be producing just software. At the very least there will be documentation and other end user collateral. There will also be artifacts that are not valuable to the end user but may be of immense value to other stakeholders. It could be argued then that pretty much anything turned out by the team has value to someone. So what is waste? Working code is too narrow. Absolutely anything the team does is too wide.