Is Scrum Dead, Yet Again?
Is Scrum over or we don’t need such precise instructions anymore?
Another day, another round of ‘The End of Scrum’ and ‘The Death of Agile’ headlines flooding our social media feeds. It’s like a broken record, isn’t it? And those recent mass layoffs of Agile Practitioners from major companies only add fuel to the fire.
But amidst all this chaos, a post by Maarten Dalmijn caught my eye today, and it made me think.
[To think I hoped for a day off from social media 😅]
While I agree that Scrum as outlined in the Scrum Guide may slowly be disappearing, I’m not entirely convinced it’s heading for extinction.
Maarten Dalmijn 📖, let’s have a chat about this! My take on it is that many companies fell into the trap of creating a bubble of Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches. Similar to the dot-com bubble of the 2000s. They believed that flooding their teams with these Agile People (as I will refer to Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches) would automatically make them Agile. As if doing Scrum by-the-book will elevate the efficiency and productivity of the companies. But as we dig deeper, we find cracks in this approach.
Firstly, hiring a wave of Agile practitioners at once doesn’t guarantee top-notch performance from each one. Secondly, achieving true agility requires more than just following Scrum rituals — it demands a holistic transformation encompassing DevOps culture and development practices. Perfecting Sprint Planning won’t do much if your test code coverage remains close to zero.
Agile Manifesto states clearly:
“We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.”
It’s about developing software in a better way, not just putting processes around it.
I actually agree with Capital One assessment:
“The agile role in our tech organization was critical to our earlier transformation phases, but as our organization matured, the natural next step is to integrate agile delivery processes directly into our core engineering practices,” — Capital One.
Yet, I still think they need some Agile Practitioners, operational people to help with the team collaboration and change management for the development good practices adoption. That’s not as easy as it seems.
As a society of people working in technology, we arrived at the plateau or some even the transcendence phase (Shu-Ha-Ri) of the Agile frameworks. It’s time to break them and come up with our own way. A way that can be based on the already crafted and successfully used agile practices.
While Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide might slowly disappear, the concept Sprints might not. The backbone of the framework provides teams with valuable feedback loops, a sense of predictability and also some stability.
Looking ahead, the future of Agile lies in crafting a customizable fusion of practices from Scrum, Kanban, XP, DevOp and more. All while prioritizing collaboration, code quality, and — dare I say it — getting our hands dirty with technical aspects of software development.
Swing by my page sometime; I’d love to help you navigate the Agile chaos firsthand!
I expect that Scrum will not disappear but shrink. Away with the theater / mechanical / Zombie Scrum implementations. If this reduces Scrum's market share to 10%, why not? I hope that this will a change in the goals and offers: Less courses for beginnere and certifications, more opportunities to let people improve to the next level.