Why Scrum Is a Failed Experiment

Scrum was introduced in the 1990s and became a sensation in the early 2000s. Back then it was marketed as the cure for everything that was wrong with waterfall: slow delivery, rigid plans, unhappy developers. Companies embraced it, created new roles like Scrum Master and Product Owner, and treated it as if it were the universal recipe for agility.

Twenty years later, the verdict is clear: the promises didn’t hold up. Scrum didn’t make teams faster or more adaptive. In many places it became the opposite.

Scrum assumes that a sprint backlog should remain fixed. That might sound logical in theory, but in reality requirements shift every few days. What seemed like the top priority at the start of the week can already be irrelevant by the end of it. The result is wasted work and frustrated developers.

It also lives in an awkward middle ground. It’s not fully planned like waterfall, but it’s not truly flexible like kanban either. You don’t get the clarity of one or the flow of the other. Teams are left with the worst of both worlds.

The ceremonies were meant to improve communication, but they quickly turn into a drag. Daily stand-ups, planning, retrospectives… they eat time without producing much value. Too often they become status update theater. And the roles that were supposed to help—Scrum Masters, Product Owners—end up adding bureaucracy instead of removing it.

Retrospectives are a perfect example. They’re supposed to drive continuous improvement, but in practice they repeat the same obvious points, produce action items no one follows up on, and force people into artificial formats that feel childish. Problems that could be solved on the spot are postponed for the sake of “the process.”

Another hidden cost is how Scrum erodes expertise. The culture of “everyone has a voice” sounds inclusive, but it often means specialists get drowned out. After explaining the same things over and over, they get tired and stop fighting. Wrong ideas end up implemented just because they surfaced in a meeting. Over time, that builds technical debt.

Scrum was sold as agility, but in practice it slows teams down and rewards process compliance instead of outcomes. It optimizes for running Scrum itself, not for delivering value.

Scrum had its moment, and maybe it helped the industry break free from waterfall. But it hasn’t aged well. In today’s environment it produces waste, bureaucracy, and demotivation more often than it produces working software. It’s time to admit it: Scrum is a failed experiment, and we should move on.