I get really tired of seeing this once a month. OP had a bad experience with Scrum. Lots of people have. I've seen it be incredibly effective. I generally prefe

I get really tired of seeing this once a month. OP had a bad experience with Scrum. Lots of people have. I've seen it be incredibly effective. I generally prefer Kanban, the principles are mostly the same. In my experience, the effectiveness really boils down to team maturity. The crux of the process revolves around writing user stories that define an increment of user value and executing on each story past all defined quality gates in strict priority order. It does not and really cannot make a team actually operate faster, only deliver increments with observable velocity. In practice, most teams will end up going slower, but delivering more accurately and reducing rework or unmet expectations. At best, Scrum or Kanban with a tool like JIRA are really there to establish a shared vernacular and facilitate clear communication and manage expectations. And if done properly, they are incredibly effective. My biggest problem with Scrum in particular is really the word "Sprint". It implies we're all rushing to a goal and that's really never the cast. Literally just rename your 2-week iteration as a "Slog" and change nothing else and see how people react. Where the process typically breaks down is being unclear about priorities, working on too many things at once, skipping quality gates, defining tasks instead of features or trying to estimate an entire product backlog at once and setting a deadline that is utterly doomed to fail.