(2022-02-08) Jeffries The Fall Of Scrum

Ron Jeffries: The Fall of Scrum? I’m pretty sure that my Twitter and Slack streams are seeing an increase in the “Scrum should die in a fire” community

over 90 percent of the money going to the Scrum Alliance is surely corporate fees for training and conferences, not the money of individuals who are out there clamoring to become ScrumMasters. What do those corporations think that they are buying with the money they dump into courses? It’s easy to figure out.

The company wants more “productivity” while spending less.

The bulk of the fees go to ScrumMaster training. I think it’s about 75 or 80 percent. The next large tranche goes to Product Owners. Perhaps one percent goes to developer training

This pretty much fits the “extractive capitalism” notion that Gee Paw Hill talks about.

We do not know–no one knows–how well Scrum installations deliver higher productivity, how often they make the lives of their teams better.

Scrum very commonly does not deliver much productivity; because corporate managers don’t know how to use Scrum, much less measure it; and because their approach to using Scrum in fact makes people’s lives worse rather than better.

It’s too soon to say whether in fact Scrum and similar methods are failing in the market. I can’t decide whether I hope that they are, or that they are not

The rebirth of Agile? That would be nice.