I believe in the principles described in the Agile Manifesto. After 40+ years developing software as a software engineer, architect, manager, and executive, I know that they enable me to deliver products efficiently and effectively. I agree with Martin that the Scrum fad is detrimental to software development and software developers. Scrum reduces the development process to its lowest levels of absurdity and is frequently implemented as a hamster wheel for developers — sapping energy and destroying creativity.

The real benefits of Scrum accrue to its purveyors, not to its users. The basic process can only work for simple systems made up of things like Web pages. Its aversion to architecture and design ill suit it to complex, data-oriented, distributed applications such as the hybrid cloud-enabled systems required to implement today’s corporate digital transformation initiatives.

I assume that much of Scrum’s popularity comes from reducing a complex and difficult to understand engineering process to a set of apparently simple, repeatable steps. Modern software systems are complex constructs of hundreds of thousands of coding statements that make up thousands of code modules that are spread over hundreds of servers communicating over local and wide area networks — and requiring high reliability, performance, and security. You wouldn’t use Scrum to build a chemical plant or an airplane — why would you assume you could use it to build a complex software system?