Are Scrums a Cancer?

Santiago Valdarrama teaches machine learning. He posted this week on Twitter and LinkedIn that "Scrum is a cancer." Some highlights:I've been writing software for 25 years, and nothing renders a software team useless like Scrum does... We spent more time talking than doing... We spent more time estimating story points than writing software... Imagine having a manager, a scrum master, a product owner, and a tech lead. You had to answer to all of them and none simultaneously... I believe in Agile, but this ain't agile... The result was always the same: It didn't work. Scrum is a cancer that will eat your development team. Scrum is not for developers; it's another tool for managers to feel they are in control. DevOps.com shares some reactions, including the developer who calls Scrum "a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good for one thing: Taking developers who can't or don't want to see the overall business/architecture picture and getting useful work out of them." But later in the week, Valdarrama revisited the issue with a follow-up post. "After 3,400 replies, I learned a few things."First, the most common jobs among the people who told me I was wrong were "Agile Coach" and "Scrum Master...." Second, Scrum can't fail because Scrum is whatever you want Scrum to be. There's no right way to do Scrum, so if it doesn't work for you, you aren't as bright as you thought you were. Third, Scrum isn't agile, except when it is. But it's much better than Waterfall, except when it isn't. And it's better than nothing and everything at the same time. Fourth, many people got triggered by my comparison of Scrum and communism... Finally, by far, most people hate Scrum with passion. Thanks to Slashdot reader RUs1729 for sharing the link.

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