In a recent article titled Why Do Many Developers Consider Scrum to Be an Evil Scam, Scrum consultant Willem-Jan Ageling bemoaned the clear impression that people outside his professional circle didn’t share the same devotion to the framework, "I am a Scrum enthusiast. When I'm in my Agile bubble, I have the pleasure of having great conversations. We may have different opinions about approaches, but in the end, we mostly agree on the merits of Agile and Scrum. But when I leave my bubble, I often receive backlash. The worst thing I have been called is a snake oil salesman, selling an evil scam".
I won’t unpick his arguments in detail. I don’t think Scrum is an evil scam and I don’t think Mr Ageling is a snake oil salesman. Yet I have seen Scrum being misapplied too often to ever become an enthusiast again. Here are my very personal reasons, based on first-hand evidence. It’s biased, but then I don’t pretend to speak for ‘many’ developers, let alone all.