Can Scrum Be Salvaged?

I’ve been in countless Scrum meetings that felt like a waste of time. You might relate - watching engineers zone out during standups, sprint planning meetings that drag on forever, and retrospectives that never lead to real change.

Yet occasionally, I see teams where Scrum actually works. They’re rare, but they exist. These teams have adapted Scrum to fit their needs rather than following it blindly. This got me thinking - can we salvage Scrum?

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails, puts it perfectly:

The secret to both productivity and happiness for creative people is to be granted the serenity of long stretches of uninterrupted time. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where flow happens. You can’t get into the zone if your weekly calendar is peppered with stand-up meetings, catch-up meetings, and 1-1s.

The problem runs deeper than just inefficient meetings. Software development has evolved beyond recognition since Scrum’s inception in 2001. Back then, deploying code meant burning CDs. Mobile apps didn’t exist. Cloud computing was a dream. Yet somehow, we’re still clinging to a process designed for that era.

Think about your own experience. How many times have you found yourself in a standup, reciting what you did yesterday when it’s already documented in Jira? Or sat through a retrospective where the same issues are raised sprint after sprint, with no real change? The ritual has replaced the reason.

The real cost isn’t just time - it’s cognitive disruption. Software development demands deep focus. Every time we pull developers into another ceremony, we’re breaking their flow state. In a typical Scrum setup, with daily standups and various other meetings, we’re essentially guaranteeing that developers never reach their peak productive state.

Money talks, and here’s what it’s saying: companies are spending thousands of dollars per hour to have their entire engineering team stand in a circle discussing ticket updates that could have been an email. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that Scrum was supposed to be a tool to help teams work better, not a religion to be followed unquestioningly.

The disconnect between Scrum and engineering practices becomes even more apparent when you look at continuous deployment pipelines. Teams are pushing code to production dozens of times per day, yet we’re still pretending that work neatly fits into two-week sprint boxes. It’s like trying to measure a fiber optic network’s bandwidth with a sundial.

What’s particularly frustrating is seeing teams achieve amazing results when they break free from rigid Scrum practices.

But perhaps the most damaging aspect of traditional Scrum is how it’s being used as a management control tool rather than an agile methodology. Product owners treat the sprint backlog like a binding contract. Scrum Masters become process police rather than team facilitators. The very framework that was supposed to empower teams has become a tool for micromanagement.

This isn’t to say that everything about Scrum is broken. The core principles - empirical process control, self-organization, continuous improvement - these are still valuable. But the implementation needs a serious overhaul for the modern software development landscape.

The question isn’t whether we need to salvage Scrum - it’s how. Because right now, in most organizations, it’s creating more problems than it’s solving. We need to stop treating Scrum like an unchangeable set of rules and start seeing it as a starting point for building processes that actually serve modern development teams.

The Cost of Scrum

Let me break down a typical Scrum week for a team of eight engineers. I’m using real numbers here, and the math might make you uncomfortable.

Software engineers in the US earn an average of $150,000 per year. That’s roughly $75 per hour. Multiply that by eight engineers, and you’re looking at $600 of engineering time for every hour spent in meetings.

A typical Scrum team’s weekly ceremony schedule looks like this: Daily standups take 15 minutes (if you’re lucky), sprint planning eats up 2 hours, sprint review needs an hour, and retrospectives consume another hour. That’s already 4.75 hours per week just for the basic ceremonies.

But here’s what people forget - it’s not just the meeting time. Every meeting has a context-switching cost. Research shows it takes about 23 minutes to regain deep focus after an interruption. For daily standups alone, that’s 23 minutes of recovery time, five times a week, for eight engineers.

Let’s do the math: Basic ceremonies (4.75 hours) plus context-switching recovery time (15.3 hours) equals 20 hours of lost engineering time per week. At $600 per hour, that’s $12,000 of engineering time spent on process every week. Over $600,000 per year.

And we haven’t even counted the “soft” costs - the bugs that creep in when developers can’t maintain focus, the architectural insights that never happen because nobody has time to think deeply, the innovations lost to death by meeting.

I’m not saying all these meetings are worthless. But when you put actual numbers to it, you have to ask: Is the return on investment there? Could we achieve the same goals - alignment, communication, improvement - without sacrificing so much productive time?

At some point, we stopped questioning this expense. We accepted it as the cost of doing agile. But imagine if someone proposed a new development tool that cost your company $600,000 a year and required 40% of your engineers’ time. You’d demand pretty compelling evidence of its value, wouldn’t you?

When Teams Make Scrum Work

The Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia - one of the world’s biggest websites - using a modified version of Scrum. They ditched rigid daily meetings. They let engineers choose when to sync up. They adapt sprint lengths based on what makes sense for each project.

Their results prove the point. Despite having far fewer resources than tech giants, they ship new features steadily and keep the site running smoothly. They did this by questioning every part of Scrum and keeping only what helped their developers work better.

We see similar patterns at other successful teams. Microsoft’s developer division took a similar path. They keep the parts that add value - regular planning and clear goals. But they stripped away the ceremonies and rigid rules that slowed them down.

The key is that these teams view Scrum as a starting point, not a rule book. They measure success by what they deliver, not how well they follow the process. Sprint lengths change when needed. Meetings happen when useful, not because a schedule demands it.

Notice what’s missing from these teams - no one stands in circles giving daily updates that could be emails. No one spends hours debating story points. No scrum master polices the process. Instead, engineers talk when they need to. They plan when planning makes sense. They release when features are ready.

These teams succeed because they put their developers’ work first and adapt everything else around that core priority. That’s what salvaging Scrum really means - keeping the useful bits and fearlessly changing or dropping the rest.