Scrum & Agile... new buzzwords OVERdone and rarely UNDERstood

SCRUM and Agile are things people "do" but rarely understand, especially the WHY. Moreover many people and companies don't adapt it to their situation which results in a lot waste in terms of time and money.

SCRUM in particular is very disciplined and I've seen more time going into the SCRUM than into the work at some places. I think there is a real value to following the very strict rules for any company new to learning the SCRUM process to get a baseline. After that, you need to adapt it to your organization and don't over do it. Haphazardly applied dicipline is how you end up with kids going to jail for a plastic butter knife because, you know, zero tolerance on knives at school.

Agile has a lot of advantages over waterfall & formal development, but it also can get overdone and a bigger picture can be missed. In particuar when the rush to have working software abondons all thought about overall design and looking a little further down the road, features that shoud be easy to add or scale aren't and ends up causing a lot of rework. Furthermore software can wind up being brittle. I've also seen test driven development goto a level of silliness where more time went into writing tests than writing software to get things done. Worse, they weren't testing things that were critical if they failed.