Having worked at primarily at “informally agile” software companies in Silicon Valley (and I count Google as one), I see an important bit of truth in the article that Scrum ideas have become the embodiment of agile, and ideas from Scrum that may not make sense in isolation have become standard practice in software development and are somehow seen as the alternative to “waterfall” development, even if they have nothing inherently to do with waterfall vs agile development.

For example, it’s never made sense to me to have a powerful product owner while treating the development team as N interchangeable workers who may have “areas of focus” but have no roles, responsibilities, or organization among themselves, smearing out any sort of power or responsibility for technical quality like butter spread on toast. And yet, the fact that Scrum says to do it makes me wonder if that’s why everyone does it. Reading Scrum’s idea of a development team made me facepalm.

I don’t think the article is attacking a straw man that Scrum can turn a bad team into a good one. It may be pointing out that Scrum is regularly used to turn a good team into a bad one. Because everyone wants to be “agile,” even if they never use the word Scrum, they are implementing bad Scrum or cargo-cult Scrum by default.