As we close out 2023, we at DevOps.com wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2023.

Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: Scrum sucks, sources say; and here comes the Linux 6.5 kernel.

1. “Scrum is a Cancer”

So says an outspoken commentator. And, predictably, the internet went ballistic. Many agreed, sharing their own anecdata—but others said, “You’re doing it wrong.”

Analysis: Ugly analogy; insightful points

T-shirts and story points and ceremonies—oh my! What a lot of busywork inspired by consultant grift. But could we at least say Scrum might be useful for managing inexperienced teams?

Santiago Valdarrama is the perpetrator: Scrum is a cancer

“It didn’t work”
I’ve been writing software for 25 years. … Nothing renders a software team useless like Scrum does. … Scrum is a cancer that will eat your development team.
…
They had us attending the “ceremonies”—a fancy name for a buttload of meetings: Stand-ups, groomings, planning, retrospectives, and Scrum of Scrums. We spent more time talking than doing. … We spent more time estimating story points than writing software. … We paid people who told us whether we were “burning down points” fast enough (weren’t story points about complexity instead of time?) … We brought in professional Scrum trainers. We paid people from our team to get certified. We tried Scrum this way and that other way. We spent years doing it.
…
The result was always the same: It didn’t work. … Scrum is not for developers; it’s another tool for managers to feel they are in control.

Preach! Konrad Banachewicz raises his hands to heaven:

I wish I could upvote you several times. I have a burning hatred for scrum, and I believe every single one of its creators deserves to be punished.

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing? Not exactly, thinks mwint:

I’ve developed a more nuanced view on Scrum. … It is a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good for one thing: Taking developers who can’t or don’t want to see the overall business/architecture picture and getting useful work out of them. … If you’re trying to make a process than can take [them] and produce an output that scales almost-kinda linearly with dev count, it sort of works.
…
I can also see how a company ends up there: Go through a tough hiring year, or even just make a few poor hiring decisions, and now you have people on the team who need handholding and supervision. That’s what Scrum is—it feels like micromanagement because it is.

Sounds like it sucks if you’re a competent, experienced dev. For example, u/Own_Spare_544:

I was suddenly placed in a Scrum team during a reorg, and have been working in that environment for the past 5 months. … It’s becoming unbearable.
…
We have no input on what we work on, or feedback on how it is implemented. … We have no discussions about the big picture. … There is no real input on what, when, and barely how anything gets done. … Never in my career have I had such little autonomy, creative freedom, or recognition.

Cue the chorus of, “You’re doing it wrong.” David Sabine joins in:

It’s exhausting to read stories like this — teams of people doing bizarre things and blaming it on Scrum. … It’s fashionable to blame Scrum. [But] unless individuals each take responsibility for the betterment of their team and work environment, those problems will remain long after Scrum is the fashionable scapegoat.

Oh yeah. xedrac spits out the Kool-Aid:

I’ve spoken up in many retrospectives, but when nothing changes, it’s hard to take them seriously. What’s the point of a retrospective if your feedback is simply discarded?

2. Here Comes Linux 6.5

The eighth release candidate seems “good enough.” Linus says there’s “no excuse” not to ship it.

Analysis: Perf wars

Many of the changes in 6.5 are enabling performance and throughput improvements. While there’s not much that’s huge and flashy this time around, the perf gains might make 6.5 worth looking into.

Nick Farrell: Torvalds releases Linux 6.5 kernel

Linus Torvalds announced … the release of the Linux 6.5 kernel series as a major update. [It] has features like … ACPI support for the RISC-V architecture, Landlock support for UML (User-Mode Linux), better support for AMD “Zen” systems, … user-space support for the ARMv8.8 memcpy/memset instructions, … Intel TPMI (Topology Aware Register and PM Capsule Interface) for the power capping subsystem and a TPMI interface driver for Intel RAPL, and the “runnable boosting” feature in the EAS balancer to improve CPU utilization for specific workloads.
…
This release also improves … EXT4 file system’s journalling, block allocator subsystems, and performance for parallel DIO overwrites.

And Marius Nestor has: 6.5 Officially Released

After seven weeks of RCs, Linux kernel 6.5 is here. … The performance for the Btrfs file system has been improved as well in this release, which also introduces SGX/HPE Ultraviolet support for the Sub-NUMA clustering (SNC).
…
Of course, there are also numerous new and updated drivers for various devices. … Among these, there are drivers for the AHT20 temperature and humidity sensor, HP WMI sensors, and the ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard.

Horse’s mouth? Linus Torvalds:

So nothing particularly odd or scary happened this last week, so there is no excuse to delay the 6.5 release. … Anyway, this obviously means that the merge window for 6.6 starts tomorrow. I already have ~20 pull requests pending and ready to go.

Is Btrfs finally ready for prime time? WereCatf sounds negative:

No. … I am keeping an eye on bcachefs as a possible replacement. … I’ve also found a rather big issue with Btrfs where you can hard-crash the Btrfs-driver in the kernel by using mergerfs with individual Btrfs-formatted drives/partitions … so I’ve become far less enamored with it than I was before.

Meanwhile, this cowardly CommunityMember flirts with numerology:

And kernel 6.6 might even end up being an LTS release, so 6.6.6 might be a kernel that never dies.

The Moral of the Story:
When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too

—Paulo Coelho

You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi, @richij or tlv@richi.uk.

Image: Thomas Jarrand (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)