Interesting article, however I have a different take on it. Agile/XP was originally envisioned to reduce the impact of middle management/business processes on

Interesting article, however I have a different take on it. Agile/XP was originally envisioned to reduce the impact of middle management/business processes on software development and put the customer and developer together to get things done. During the early days of XP/Agile this worked in certain areas where it was feasible to do so and there were not a lot of already establish business processes and business people who had a vested interested in preventing it. At some point middle/product/project managers realized that this was just another business process and adopted and morphed it as their own. Although agile was invented and made for developers, today only non-engineers are involved in 'agile'. As a result we have craziness like scrum master as a full-time non-development job that requires certification from a business process body. Additionally the process people have added a ton of process cruft (burn down charts, playing poker with card decks, etc.) All of which is mostly unnecessary business processes. So we're back to where we were before and developers and customers continue to be separated from each other. In the new world, engineering leadership is being replaced by non-technical business people with certifications. The has lead to less skilled teams of 'developers and testers' that are no longer guided by highly technical engineers that have either actual or perceived power in the organization. The net result of all of this is that developers are struggling in many orgs.