Why Ranting that "Scrum is Terrible" is a Straw Man Argument

My good friend and colleague at Learning Tree, Doug Rehnstrom, sent me a link last month to a blog post by Michael O. Church entitled “Why ‘Agile’ and especially Scrum are Terrible”. My first reaction to it was that it was an entertaining if misguided rant, but in retrospect Michael says some important things. He talks of companies that have been “killed” by Scrum, and complains about what he calls the “humiliating transparency” required of programmers who he claims are treated as “interchangeable, commoditized components” by Agile. He makes the claim that Agile…”has engineers still quite clearly below everyone else: the ‘product owners’ and ‘scrum masters’ outrank ‘team members’, who are the lowest of the low.” Technical debt piles up in Agile organizations, he tells us, and is not addressed, and wraps all this up as a conspiracy theory in which Agile/Scrum “eradicates even the possibility of work that’s acceptable for a mid-career or senior engineer”, part of an age-discrimination culture aimed at “chasing out our elders”. As a 60-year old who has been a software engineer for most of my working life, and has been using Scrum for seventeen years, and who is yet to be chased out of the industry, I would like to respond.

Read more at http://blog.learningtree.com/uk/why-ranting-that-scrum-is-terrible-is-a-straw-man-argument/