I've done a fair amount of Scrum and have seen it succeed and fail. Scrum works and is great, but like most tools it works only for specific types of jobs.
I wouldn't use Scrum in a situation where the final product is somewhat defined and is expected at a certain date. Any situation where you ask yourself 'why aren't we using waterfall here?' is one where Scrum will inevitably fail.
Scrum is typically great for startups (and sometimes established companies) that are building something that is more of an idea than a product and time is irrelevant due to being able to push new features out later if they aren't done. It helps if your customer doesn't expect polish and is fine with incremental improvements.
To use the Minecraft analogy, Scrum would be a great process for Mojang. The target is moving, the features the developers thought were significant yesterday have found to be of no concern to the users, and thus they can drop something and focus a new feature. The next version has what's done, not necessarily what was expected. Waterfall wouldn't work in this situation at all.
I wouldn't use Scrum in a situation where the final product is somewhat defined and is expected at a certain date. Any situation where you ask yourself 'why aren't we using waterfall here?' is one where Scrum will inevitably fail.
Scrum is typically great for startups (and sometimes established companies) that are building something that is more of an idea than a product and time is irrelevant due to being able to push new features out later if they aren't done. It helps if your customer doesn't expect polish and is fine with incremental improvements.
To use the Minecraft analogy, Scrum would be a great process for Mojang. The target is moving, the features the developers thought were significant yesterday have found to be of no concern to the users, and thus they can drop something and focus a new feature. The next version has what's done, not necessarily what was expected. Waterfall wouldn't work in this situation at all.