Like with all self-help formulas, Kent will label his solution as magic bullet for all software development problems. He will advertise it as secret medicine that cures all ills. He will be at every conference, write articles after articles, publish books.
Also, like all magic self-help formulas, it wouldn’t quite work. So, Kent will invent something new. His next prescription was TDD and when I first saw it, I thought it was a joke. But people around me started drinking cool aid and if you didn’t join them then you weren’t one of them. Again, Kent and friends will go out on massive marketing spree advertising it as secret talisman. Like all overweight desperate people in need to lose weight, people will enthusiastically start new Kent Beck diet, lose few pounds and endorse the formula. But they will soon find that they had simply traded one problem for another more uglier one.
This went on for long time. For more than two decades, these group of people kept inventing these processes, selling it as magic pill and made millions upon millions in consulting gigs, books, training, certifications and so on. They came up with Agile and 17 people in that group created “agile manifesto”. Their most aggressively marketed prescription was scrum. Like their all previous prescription, world is finally coming off of night of drinking cool aid and feeling severe headache.
I think most of these people have now sort of retired after amassing massive fortunes and hopefully we will not see more of these magic processes pushed to dumb CTOs with promises of curing all ills.
The truth is Scrum was never a magic bullet and it is downright harmful for many projects. It is useful for highly predictable projects where research component is negligible, for example, CRUD websites AND where you are stuck with unmotivated tier-3 talent who failed to get job at insurance company. For everything else, it should never have been used. It is especially going to hurt creativity, originality and novelty if you are in business of making a differentiating unique novel product. It also is very very bad choice if you already had tier-1 highly motivated team.
So exercise caution!