Sheila's Blog

The ScrumMaster is the member of the team that’s responsible for guiding the team and ensuring that the spirit of scrum is being followed.  They act as a buffer between the team and external influences. They do any administrative work, run the meetings and help remove any impediments that are blocking the team from delivering their sprint goals.  It’s hard to define the role as it can grow depending on the circumstances.

The scrum master is a non-traditional management role.  As the team is self-organizing, the scrum master is not the leader of the team.  But the scrum master coaches the group and helps them to become a team, acting as a role model and encouraging change.  A good scrum master emodies the qualities of servant leadership – focusing on the needs of the team rather than their own.  Eventually a scrum master may coach a team to the point where their role is effectively obsolete.

The Scrum master is responsible for maintaining quality in a number of ways.  They prevent the team from building the kind of bad quality legacy code that lurks in many companies.  Code that is brittle and awkward – very easy to break, but doesn’t have a good test harness to highlight problems and identify what’s been broken.  There’s usually a shortage of developers that can actually work on the code.  The poor legacy code is what handicaps the velocity of a team in this situation.  This kind of code is the result of repeated development cycles where quality hasn’t been prioritised highly enough.  A vicious cycle occurs where quality controls are cut back to increase velocity and each subsequent release has a slightly lower velocity as the code base deteriorates requiring further skimping on quality.

The scrum master applies controls to prevent this happening.  The team is not allowed to demonstrate any task or story that has not been fully completed in time for the Sprint review.  These items must be carried on to the next Sprint if still relevant.  When there’s a problem with meeting a deadline, the scrum master makes sure that quality isn’t compromised in order to increase the team’s velocity and make up time.  Increasing the hours worked can’t happen often as working longer hours results in reduced quality.   Teams need to maintain a sustainable pace to perform well so the only aspect that should be altered is the scope of what has to be done.  Changing requirements in scrum doesn’t carry the heavy penalties it would when using waterfall, so the answer is to revisit the requirements and make sure they’re still valid and that the most important ones are completed first. The scrum master works with the product owner to reprioritise what must be done.

The scrum master is a difficult role to do well and ultimately has responsibility for how the scrum team will perform.  For this reason, it’s an important role to fill with someone who won’t lead the group astray.

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