#Agile #ScrumMaster #TeamCollaboration
Hey there, fellow devs! 👋 I recently started working in a small team where our senior dev takes charge during stand-ups, assigning tasks and keeping the team on track. It got me thinking – do we really need a designated Scrum Master in our company?
🤔 So, do you have a Scrum Master at your workplace? Why or why not? Let’s discuss! Here are some points to consider:
– Having a Scrum Master can help ensure that the team stays focused on the sprint goals and removes any obstacles that might come up.
– On the flip side, some may argue that team members can take on the responsibilities of a Scrum Master themselves, making the role redundant.
💡 Here’s a possible solution:
– Maybe we can consider rotating the role of Scrum Master among team members to give everyone a chance to lead and learn from the experience.
What do you think? Share your thoughts and experiences! 🌟 #TeamWork #ContinuousImprovement
I am scrum master.
You beckoned me?
No, but I work for a small business in a very small team.
In fact I never learned anything about agile/scrum. I’m surprised we even have a project manager
We did. We fired them all a year or two ago.
There’s more to it than asking everyone what they did yesterday, which anyone could do. Ideally they are guiding the team and project manager through prioritizing and sizing (estimating how complex a task is or how long it will take.) The goal of which is to ensure the devs are always working on the most valuable tasks possible, and the managers have some idea when things will be done.
Our work is unlike most other fields in that we’re always doing everything for the first time. The exact opposite would be something like Chipotle—they make burritos all day long, there’s not much variation, and someone at Chipotle corporate knows to the tenth of a second how long it takes.
In our field, a deliverable might be something like “when a passenger checks their flight status, also show them the weather in their destination city”. Whoever works on this has never done it before, and there’s a lot of uncertainty in how long it takes. Employers can’t work with “it’ll be done when it’s done” though. If they know in advance it will take a year for something like this, they might abandon the idea altogether!
The uncertainty can be reduced if someone breaks it down into smaller tasks (research weather APIs, add a weather element to the UI, create a Redis cache to store known weather information, etc), so they can be sized and organized by what blocks what. This is where Scrum comes in handy, and someone has to administer it.
Our EMs are scrum masters. “Scrum master” is not really a dedicated position in most places
Thankfully not but lots of places follow this like it’s a religion
I think every team/company is different. We do sprints and have meetings, and theres a member of the product team that tends to lead the meetings more than others but we don’t really have a “scrum master” and I don’t think they’re actually certified or anything. Not really sure how much more a certified scrum master would bring to the team
The idea of estimating ticket sizes with any reasonable level of accuracy is 100% fiction imo
Yes.
We haven’t hired a single one since rate hikes – but we still have them
If you work in a big company with strict hierarchy and strong politics, a scrum master can literally be the difference of having successful deliveries or not.
So whether you have a dedicated scrum master is a function of your project’s size.
If your project is small and has only one or two teams working on it, then it isn’t worth it. In those environments, a team member will take the role. It might be the team lead. It might be a way to give a new hire something productive to do for the team while they catch up on all the HR training modules the company is legally required to show you and come to grips with the company’s quirks and systems. It might be a way to give a very junior dev a place to get started while they learn how to actually do the work of software development (there’s a lot of practical stuff about software development they don’t necessarily teach in college).
If your project is large, however, the amount of context switching you’d get from having a team member do it start to become an inefficiency in your process. There comes a point when designating a single person to do that jobs, manage the team’s calendar, and attend some meetings on the team’s behalf becomes enough of an efficiency and productivity gain that the role becomes worth it. The best ones will even keep you out of Jira.
I’m on a huge project. Were it not for my dedicated scrum master, I’d be in meetings most of the day. Someone would have to keep arranging rooms on the meeting invite.
Thank god, we do not.
I’ve never seen “SCRUM done right.” I have no desire to deal with SCRUM done wrong. I prefer the more agile processes like Kanban.
My previous company requires daily scrum. The scrum master simply created stories and assigned tasks to people but he didn’t know jack shit. Why?
I’ve seen it done both ways. Usually if one person’s full time job is to just be a scrum master, they are in that role for many projects like 3-5, because just the mechanics of asking people what they did yesterday isn’t a full time job. Note however that these people usually also do the planning, grooming, prioritization, manage the JIRA or Kanban board, often communicate to business/product and leadership, collect and present stats on team productivity, etc. so there is a lot more to it than the 15 minutes you spend with them every morning. It also happens that this role is filled by a senior engineer on the team. However you could then say that it is not a good use of a senior engineer’s time to just do status checks etc.
My company used to have a team of agile coaches. They were all let go like 2 years ago.
It’s often just hard to justify it for small teams but it does help out. Smaller teams people just wear that hat.
Just like I’m a dev lead and build manager…which absolutely is not how it should be lol. A good hour+ of my day is eaten up with that leaving me less time to actually code.
I’ve had one scrum master in my career. He was actually a competent person and I would have loved to work with him in another context. That being said, you’re correct it’s a useless role. I would guess most of them are gone now in the downturn.
Every Scrum Team (if they’re really using Scrum) has the role of *Scrum Master* – exactly *who* fills that role may differ from team to team. It may be a dedicated individual, or it may be someone with other duties, but they are still fulfilling the role of Scrum Master.
Learn the basics of agile to understand the how’s and why’s and recognize that you’ll most likely never see a “by the book correct” implementation of anything. The first agile flavor I encountered was XP, I’ve been in mostly agile environments for the last couple of decades, and seen everything from “agile means making shit up on the daily” to adhering to the general spirit of it.
So, if you want to know if any of my companies had a scrum master… Yeah, sometimes sorta.
We had a scrum master, but they got rid of the person after an year
Just FYI I was told this year that “scrum master” is bad terminology, similar to “master” branch in Git. The proper term is “Agile Champion” from what I was told. Anyways, yeah I agree that typically very little value is added from these types of roles, but I know there are also some agile champions who are indispensable to their teams