The real purpose of the scrum in rugby is to tie up half of the players (the forwards - the backs are not in the scrum) when restarting play.
Literally to remove the forwards from the play after a restart, by having them all bound together with their arms twisted around each other.
Then, when the ball pops out, the field of play is nice and empty for a few seconds and some running rugby can take place, while the forwards slowly untangle themselves from the scrum.
To translate to software engineering and agile, if scrum is taking half of the team's developers and tieing them up and preventing them from doing any work, then scrum is working exactly as intended.
To expand the analogy further the scrum, in modern rugby, is the worst part of the game and has gone through several iterations the last couple of decades to reform it as it often ends in a stalemate or arbitrary penalty to one side (as good as a coin flip), or worse: a head injury.
The approach has seen the game settle with "Crouch, Bind, Set", which seems to be a good compromise. And yet the hooker always, alwaysALWAYS, puts the ball in crooked and yet never gets called up on it.
In other words, it's all a big waste of time and energy.
(We're using agile at work, daily standups and retros, and it seems to be working)
Gah! Brain, I was thinking about which player usually strikes the ball first (hooker) rather than who feeds the scrum (scrum-half). Point still stands though I don't think I've seen a straight feed in years, at least in the Six Nations matches.
Literally to remove the forwards from the play after a restart, by having them all bound together with their arms twisted around each other.
Then, when the ball pops out, the field of play is nice and empty for a few seconds and some running rugby can take place, while the forwards slowly untangle themselves from the scrum.
To translate to software engineering and agile, if scrum is taking half of the team's developers and tieing them up and preventing them from doing any work, then scrum is working exactly as intended.