Is it time to kill Scrum?

What do you think about Scrum?

A bunch of software engineers came up with the Agile manifesto. It's simple, abstract, and effective. But somehow Scrum became the recipe to implement Agile and we ended up with a job title called Scrum Master which has been increasingly taken by non technical people inside traditional organizations.

I've seen teams that implement Scrum by the book. They have a person called Scrum Master that facilitates all team meetings. It basically turns other team members into reactive players instead of proactive. But, do we really need a person to facilitate team meetings and ceremonies?

I talked with a few Scrum Masters, their job satisfaction is actually very low and even though they don't admit it to their own team, they don't believe they are adding real value. What they all have in common is that they all want to switch to a different role and they are looking for an opportunity.

I couldn’t find anything similar in other industries, and it's hard to find a successful development team that implements Scrum by the book. What you find most of the time is what is called "other Scrum flavors" and I think that's a problem in our industry. What many teams are doing isn't Scrum, but anything that has a short release cycle, a daily update, and a retrospective is called Scrum.

The irony is that most of the Silicon Valley and successful tech companies don't use Scrum at all and they are mature enough to admit it. In fact many of them don't even label what they have as Agile. But, that's a different discussion and I think at least the positive thing about Agile manifesto is that it doesn't talk about process or roles, while Scrum does.

What is happening right now is many companies wasting lots of time trying to implement Scrum by the book until they fail and move on to something that they call a Scrum flavor. But shouldn't we stop calling it Scrum so others don't have to repeat the same mistake again and again?

If a team fails, Scrum compares it to its book and says the team failed because they didn't implement Scrum properly. And when a team with one of those so-called "Scrum flavors" is successful, Scrum takes all the credit.

I personally think we should kill Scrum. We shouldn't advocate it and we shouldn't call any team with a daily standup meeting a Scrum team. Many successful tech companies don't use Scrum, but they aren't vocal about it.

What will happen to all those certified Scrum Masters? I'm sure they are going to resist the idea but I also know deep down they know Scrum is not a successful model. I've seen companies that created a small central Agile Guide team that is responsible for guiding teams to become self organized teams and help them to monitor team health etc. I don't want to promote that, but I'm sure they will be able to do something more useful than what they are doing now.

I think we must Kill Scrum and tech leaders in the industry must be very vocal about it and maybe start recognizing other methods that successful companies are using and make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake of creating certified people that follow an 18 page book inside a development team.