I come to bury Scrum, not praise it
Is Scrum dead? I don’t think so, but others do. So for those announcing its demise on blogs and Twitter, I offer this over-dramatic eulogy.
A parting panegyric that is a snarky mixture of inspiration from Shakespeare’s play ‘Julius Caesar’ and Ron Jefferies’ blog post titled ‘Dark Scrum.’
Friends, product owners, scrummasters, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Scrum, not to praise it.
The evil that frameworks do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their founders;
So let it be with Scrum. The noble Jeffries
Hath told you Scrum has a darkness:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Scrum answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Jeffries, Schwaber, Sutherland, and the rest–
For Jeffries is an agile man;
So are they all, all agile men–
Come I to speak in Scrum’s funeral.
It was my go-to framework, valuable and useful to me:
But Jeffries says it has a darkness;
And Jeffries is an agile man.
It hath brought many features delivered to market
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Scrum seem dark?
When that the dev team self-organized, Scrum hath helped:
Darkness should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Jeffries says Scrum has darkness;
And Jeffries is an agile man.
Did you all not see that in the Manifesto?
Did we not present Scrum a SAFe space,
Which it did reuse: was this darkness?
Yet Jeffries says it has darkness;
And, sure, he is an agile man.
I speak not to disprove what Jeffries spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love Scrum once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for it?
O judgment! thou art fled to oppressive beasts,
And management have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Scrum,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
