Agile is not sustainable?

Does Agile produce a working environment that is unsustainable?

Extreme Programming (XP) originally had an explicit practice called "40 Hour Week", which eventually became "Sustainable Pace".

Part of this was because of an intent to make software development humane; part of this was because people were interested in what was actually effective and not what just looked effective.  Working excessive, unsustainable hours is not effective.

As Ward Cunningham said, in response to a request to get a team to work more hours: "We would if it would help."

There are other practices that address sustainability:

• XP's velocity is intended to prevent over-commitment.
• Scrum's commitment-driven Sprint planning is intended to prevent over-commitment.

I will acknowledge that there are some things that may seem like they are designed to increase unsustainability:

• The use of the word "sprint"
• Daily stand-ups
• The continuous flow approach of kanban
• Continuous Delivery

All the principles and practices designed for increased pace and speed can easily lead to unsustainability if you hold a particular mistaken assumption.

The mistaken assumption is that Agile encourages a one-way communication where a Product Owner tells a development team what to do rather than a n-way collaboration between everyone because that's just a better way to do software development.