So now all the Scrum fans will pile on and say, “Martin, you misunderstand Scrum”.

But in fact, you understand it just fine.

Scrum is not a good fit for a team of very experienced people — people who don’t need to have their work tracked so finely.

Also, doesn’t it seem strange that there is so, so much focus on the productivity of programmers, but not on the Product Owner, or others involved in the value chain? There is so much effort expended to make sure that every drop of output is obtained from programmers, but not from anyone else!

Scrum also does harm by making people focus too much on things that don’t matter that much — things like the standup format, story size, etc. Guess what? Some things that matter a-lot more are how the team is testing, how collaboration occurs across multiple teams, what the production incident rate is, how test coverage is being managed — there are so many things, but Scrum Masters obsess over Scrum practices, as if that is what programming is all about, but programmers actually don’t need Scrum to be effective.

Scrum is also a very poor fit for Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), which requires a Kanban-like workflow.

My advice: ditch Scrum. Look to DevOps instead.