I think SCRUM works very good in some arrears. But not for writing of a "cool" product incorporating all features you can think about. SCRUM works very well for strictly regulated products or products with strict hardware limitations (medical system, defence contracts, embedded software and so on). I’m sure, you don’t want to read tons of tongue-tied regulations every time you have a bright idea, to make sure you new “cool” feature will be legal; won’t be life-threatening for patients in some weird cases; or its memory and processing time consumption is within specified boundaries. You want you PM to assign some BAs to do this job and report before the next sprint. Therefore, I think SCRUM is a great methodology in certain cases, but should not be used everywhere.

Hmmm, learning something useless for my job? Aikido, Piano and Japanise language...

private Dictionary R2A_dictionary = new Dictionary()
{
{'I', 1},
{'V', 5},
{'X', 10},
{'L', 50},
{'C', 100},
{'D', 500},
{'M', 1000},
};

private int ConvertRomanToArabic(string roman)
{
int result = 0;
int previous = Int32.MaxValue, current = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < roman.Length; i++)
{
current = R2A_dictionary[roman[i]];
result += current;
if (current > previous)
result -= previous << 1;
previous = current;
}
return result;
}