Agile and Scrum are not "Terrible" as this article suggests

I recently discovered this article:

Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible

And I wanted to discuss Agile, Scrum, and other project methodologies, and why this attitude of one is better than the other is deeply harmful.

The main issue I have with this article is that it uses Agile and Scrum like that's the only thing you can do to work on a project if you so desire to use it.

In practice, Agile, Kanban, Scrum, Waterfall, etc are just tools in your development arsenal.

For example, when you have a big production-level product (a CRM for example), you might want to add a new module to it. This, let's say, requires a team of 4 and will take 6-8 months. You aren't worrying about architecture or technical debt because they are already in place. And the architecture/design of this project has already been handled, or will be handled by an architect/senior before the main work with the team of 4 will start.

So you decide to use Scrum. Your project manager (who hopefully has a technical background) along with the team of 4 estimate and organize user stories into iterations/sprints, and you go for it. You overestimate by design, and everybody is happy and can do extra each iteration. You have 1 senior programmer in the team of 4 to lead the planning meeting at the beginning of each iteration to estimate the stories.

Also, at the end of the article the author mentions that Engineer-lead teams are good. That is true, which is why we use Agile-methodologies to manage our work. From Design to Implementation to Architecture to QA and Production, you can use Agile to manage each piece that you are responsible for while partnering with other staff like QA or Account managers to minimize the amount of time you are sitting waiting on an email response or an action item. Even with my own solo-development projects, I use a Kanban board to manage chunks of work so I don't forget something I need to set up in my code, and I could just as easily use Scrum myself as well.

In the end, the proper way to use Agile is to allow the developers to develop instead of having to use head-space to remember everything they need to do. It is not inherently bad, even in today's practice. Even if it can be (and often is) used poorly.

Thanks for reading,