What should a dedicated scrum master do?
Posted by Late_Champion529@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 132 comments
In the past, ive known “scrum master” to be a role someone on the dev team plays.
My current company has hired us a full-time Scrum Master, whos not a dev, and doesnt have access to our gitlab/developer group chat etc.
So as far as I can tell their role is to…remind us to update the Jira board, and ask if the Jira board is still accurate (they have no way of knowing more than the board says)
Anyone worked with scrum masters in this way before? What else could a person in this role do for a team?
Thanks!
HoratioWobble@reddit
Scrum lords shouldn't exist. Neither should scrum.
56killa@reddit
I'm actually surprised companies are still hiring fill time scrum masters. I've seen them just fold it into either a lead or a project managers work load.
thephotoman@reddit
I’m actually surprised companies are still buying IDE licenses and AI subscriptions. I’ve seen devs just use Notepad, and nobody needs AI.
That’s the same logic you just used here.
56killa@reddit
You seem upset for no reason. This is literally what is happening at the large company I work for, and other companies I worked in the past. The comments below confirm that too. Go yell at the c suites about it, these are decisions made above my grade.
thephotoman@reddit
Scrum masters aren’t useful, a PM or lead can do that.
IDE’s aren’t useful, you can use Notepad for that.
Scrum masters have a job that goes beyond just “running standup”. If I need to get on a call with a vendor to ask questions about the error I’m getting, I’m handing the task of getting that person on the phone off to my scrum master. If I need to sic someone on an outside team to hurry up, I usually go to my scrum master.
Sure, leads can serve in the role for smaller orgs. This will mean longer hours, more meetings, and perhaps being unresponsive to the team’s technical needs. Similarly, PMs also have jobs. They need to be as familiar with the software you’re writing as you are, but from the business point of view. They’re counting those AWS pods you leave running. They know how it adds up. They can tell you the benefits of the system in great detail, as well as its costs.
If you have three dev teams, a full time scrum master makes sense. It takes that much off the team lead and a little off the PM.
56killa@reddit
Again, I don't feel any particular way about the position. But companies have largely been deciding they don't want it, which is what I was commenting on.
ThierryOnRead@reddit
This is the norm where I work, their agenda is full of meeting but they're not very useful imho. A part from managing the holy sprint and the sacred jira tickets, which can be indeed a chore.
Daemontatox@reddit
Jira tickets are a chore ????
ThierryOnRead@reddit
I mean, sprint planning, sizing, PI préparation etc.. can be boooring
Daemontatox@reddit
Oh definitely dude , thats why i follow E.D.T ,
Every Dev for Themselves
You need tasks and sprints ? Too bad .
You are clueless without having a ticket for 5 socks and 3 martini points? Hard luck
ThierryOnRead@reddit
lol. Fuck scrum, let's follow E.D.T !
Wonderful-Habit-139@reddit
They look like a chore until you get over that initial hurdle and being comfortable with creating tickets and descriptions, setting the epics and logging the work. All of this looks like a chore when you do it the first few times.
bajapapi@reddit
Same for where I work, but in addition to dedicated Scrum Masters we also have Agile Coaches! Which feels like an even further extension of the same role lol
Shazvox@reddit
Tbf I like agile coaches. We had one and his full time job became teaching our product owners and stakeholders about what agile actually means and what is expected of them.
It made our dev work soo much easier.
GoGades@reddit
omg, I can just imagine how annoying that would be. I like the agile methodology but I can't stand the people who've managed to make agile their job. Stop looking over our shoulders and asking questions about the burndown rate - shit's getting done, leave us alone.
No_Pin_1150@reddit
I worked remote at a job with a collection of scrum masters. They kept making meetings. Maybe about 13 hours a week of their meetings.
Now with AI.. We all are scrum masters of our own scrum
polaroid_kidd@reddit
That's the job of the project manager, not of the scrum master.
xMisterSnrubx@reddit
Oh the other role they got rid of? In my old company, they got rid of the technical PMs, the Business PMs, the Business Analysts, the scrum masters are the only ones holding it together.
polaroid_kidd@reddit
That sounds like a lovely place to work at... On planet opposite..
rcls0053@reddit
I have never seen any point in one person just being a "scrum master". It is a role in one single project management framework. A scrum master releases blockers, coaches, facilitates.. Anyone can do those things. You can have it as a rotating role amongst developers. Teach them how to faciliate meetings, how to discuss with other people to coordinate stuff..
Just a role invented to sell scrum master certifications.
vocal-avocado@reddit
Maybe he is friends with the boss? Or the husband of the bosses’ daughter? Or the bosses’ side piece?
soul4rent@reddit
The best one I have ever had might as well have been the team's technical secretary.
It was really nice, since at any time we could use them as a point of contact for other teams to answer really simple questions, they helped product groom the jira ticket feature backlog in a way that still allowed for dev tickets and bug fixes to be at a reasonable priority (instead of "all features all the time" non-technical management always seems to want), they helped clean up tickets to be more descriptive in what people wanted, they scheduled meetings in a way that allowed for a lot of uninterrupted "focus time", they helped clean up our docs and centralize them so they weren't scattered all over the place, etc.
But for some reason when you say a "Scrum Master is a Secretary", a lot of them hold their noses and sometimes get offended. They'll do nothing useful and mutter something about them being "Servant Leaders". I never understood why they think secretarial work is a lesser job, since it's skilled work and is incredibly useful.
ACoderGirl@reddit
Yeah, I've never personally known anyone who was one or worked at a place with one. Another common pattern I've seen is just rotating across all team members.
I'd be pretty worried about getting laid off in that person's shoes, especially since they aren't technical. Though I wonder if they actually are a TPgM and OP just misunderstood that they are solely a scrummaster? Because that's something a TPgM would often do, but not as their sole job and all the ones I've worked with were juggling many projects at a time. A good TPgM is worth their weight in gold (though a bad one just means more red tape and having to constantly explain to them that something won't work).
thephotoman@reddit
They do a lot of the chasing. If I need to have a conversation with an outside vendor to get questions answered, I will tell my Scrum Master what I need, and it’s on them not just to get me a name, but to get me a meeting with that person. If I have some internal person for questions, but they don’t work in my office, I ask my Scrum Master to get on their calendar.
Basically, if it’s a task that uses MS Office tools and not dev tools, I ask my Scrum Master.
If you’re asking why companies hire scrum masters, you should also ask why they pay for your IDE: you don’t need it. You can just use Notepad or Vim or whatever. It’s a waste of money to buy licenses for IDEs.
Lechnerin@reddit
This guy he used to be scrum master then he was doing PM. Last night I saw him open 2 PR in the core services
bighappy1970@reddit
Read the scrum guide, understand that that scrum is temporary and move past it as soon as as responsibility possible.
mwestacott@reddit
I’ve only seen a full time scrum master work out well once. They were woking on 3 related projects, they were very pro-active with keeping the board and ceremonies nice and light, while also knowing a little of the issues our other teams were hitting or resolving. They were in meetings all the rest of the time. They really took pride in keeping things moving, and facilitating meetings to keep the devs on track or resolve issues.
Every other time we had a scrum master, it was like dealing with an officious rule crazed project nazi, set on slowing us down and harassing us to keep the board up to date. Have found it tends to work better if a lead dev, or BA organises the scrum.
skeletal88@reddit
If they don't have anything else to do, then they will pester and annoy people, ask for updates, create meetings, etc. to prove to the bosses that he is vital to the organisation. He will waste everyones time.
Feuerhamster@reddit
This is exactly what happens where I work
PancreasPillager@reddit
If this ain't the truth. Endless shit to justify their paycheck.
Tall-Coat5903@reddit
interesting choice of words there
apartment-seeker@reddit
So many people are out of work, fears of AI doing/replacing actually useful white collar jobs, yet somehow some son of a bitch gets hired as this BS xddd
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questi0nmark2@reddit
I've seen truly excellent full time scrum masters make a huge positive difference to teams and to a whole company... but in a scrum unicorn. May be the only company I've seed do agile properly and reap the benefits. In almost every other case, scrum has been what they call scrumbut, and it's not helped and often harmed things.
A good full time scrum master helps your team learn, be empowered, remove organisational frictions, facilitates team ownership, priority setting and process and culture improvements.. They are great facilitators, pattern seers, and organisational champions and navigators. They ensure the scrum rituals are not just rituals, but genuinely add value. It can work, but only if the leadership is all in on decentralised, empowering agile
hannahbay@reddit
I think unfortunately most organizations misuse the scrum master role and/or have the wrong people doing it that everyone assumes the role is useless. I had a fantastic scrum master at my first job and she was the heart of the team. It was a huge SAFE organization where we had a dozen+ teams working on a single product, she helped track dependencies and organize work across all these teams. We could say "we need a commitment from Team X about when they can deliver this feature and then we can do XYZ" and she would go track down people and get an answer and come back with a roadmap and timeline. She would do the same in reverse and tell us "Team Y needs this feature, I think we have time in the next sprint, does that work?"
Her job was basically to carve out a bubble in this huge product for us to work, shield us from unreasonable asks that would disrupt our plan, and be the go-between and hunter-downer for information across teams. And help us work as well as we could, by facilitating actual value-add rituals and telling people when huge blockers and friction were interfering with our work.
In a large organization like that, a good scrum master can make or break a team. Moving Jira tickets around is like 5% of a good scrum master's job.
penguinmandude@reddit
That’s not really a scrum master anymore but a TPM
polypolip@reddit
What's a TPM, i haven't encountered that acronym.
In my experience 2 out of 3 projects with full time scrum masters had the responsibilities as above.
A lot of it is because the process is (sometimes needlessly) complicated and if someone from the dev team had to do it they would lose their mind.
penguinmandude@reddit
Technical program manager
polypolip@reddit
I've always seen chasing dependencies between teams to be assigned as scrum master's responsibility, be it a full time role or a dev assigned. Eventually it boils down to "scrum master is the contact point between the team and the other teams or roles", mostly to keep teams free from being solicited left and right.
At my current org the scrum masters also herd the POs and PMs to make sure they get the priorities right.
ChemicalRascal@reddit
They're probably referring to "team product manager". A PM who's attached specifically to a given dev team.
polypolip@reddit
Thanks.
formerlyInspector@reddit
facilitate team ownership, put that on the backlog
VeryLazyFalcon@reddit
We had a group of scrum masters like that, helped a lot with onboarding new people, kept knowledge bases updated and made sure everything runs smoothly. But they were taking side of the devs so they got fired, moved and replaced. Now, new hires are more political officers than anything.
polypolip@reddit
That sucks. We've had our agile couch tell the project manager to leave our meeting cause it was not his job to be there. Seeing his face was wonderful cause he was a major asshole.
Izkata@reddit
This is the one I see overlooked most often. They get on good terms with other parts of the company so when you're having trouble or waiting on something, they act as an additional voice that holds extra weight with whoever that is outside of the team. I've had only one scrum master who was good at this.
Though, he also said it wasn't a full-time job, and did developer stuff with the team in his extra time.
polaroid_kidd@reddit
Such a shame I had to scroll past a lot of almost troll-like comments that regurgitate a knee-jerk reaction to a position, which has the potential to genuinely have a positive impact.
mkg11@reddit
Be the Jira master and schedule meetings for people
Frillback@reddit
Our scrum master is zero add. They can never figure out the meeting room, and when we ask them to contact IT about it they complain it's not "their job". Literally not sure what they do on a daily basis besides sit on their phone during meetings and ask what everyone else is doing. We do scrum meetings just fine without them when they are gone.
SquiffSquiff@reddit
so you have joined a bank or something close to one. No matter how nice they are on an individual/personal level, these sort of scrum masters are absolutely useless TBH. In my experience their job is to:
They are favoured by organisations that like a command and control structure and consider software development an expense that they resent.
Randomystick@reddit
In my experience it was simultaneously forbidden to refer to "developer hours" and yet you'll be constantly asked on WHEN you think a task can be completed
Frillback@reddit
I'm so done with these task estimates. I just add 1-2 days more than I think it will be completed and when I finish it early I do nothing. Otherwise the scrum master will be on my ass asking why a task did not take the expected time. I could be more productive but I'm a victim of bureaucracy.
ChemicalRascal@reddit
These things can absolutely be valuable if done properly, though I'll concede they can be done improperly and just bog everything down.
That said if you're saying you can constantly accurately estimate the number of dev hours a ticket will take, you're probably clairvoyant.
SquiffSquiff@reddit
Hard disagree.
The problem with scrum as a process is that it always tries to apply the same brain dead process to every situation. It simply doesn't work from an engineering perspective and the only reason in my opinion that it continues is because it's considered a socially acceptable format for a command and control infrastructure that can be applied from very large organisations to very small and amateur ones.
ChemicalRascal@reddit
Yes. The point of story points is not to give a time estimate, it's to estimate team capacity. Anyone who uses them for time is doing it wrong.
Right. This is why story points are about estimating capacity, not time taken. Further, any good point estimation process, including planning poker, should allow for "uh I dunno" in estimations of time, capacity, or complexity.
Sounds like you need longer sprints. If stuff overruns it overruns. If stuff overruns frequently you have some sort of problem to fix.
SquiffSquiff@reddit
I'm sorry I was completely done with scrum years ago. My current org uses shape up and my team uses kanban. It's always the same with scrum apologists. It's like apologists for communism when pointed to the fact that it its failed everywhere it's been implemented. The answer is always that it's 'not been implemented correctly'. Well, at some point you need to assess why that might be.
ChemicalRascal@reddit
🤷♂️
We do scrum the way I describe at my current place of work.
Like yeah, "scrum has never been done properly" feels right if you've never been at a place that does it. If you've worked at two places that both did this dumb shit and nothing worked and all the metrics were used as measures, yeah, it's easy to write the whole thing off.
But my literal lived experience is that this shit works and I've done it, I'm doing it now, I'll do it again in the future. I'm living in the communism done right place and I'm not in the Vanguard party (which I guess is the agile consultants in this analogy?). I can go out and pick bread from the bread tree and there's no line in sight.
Agile isn't universally a shitshow. It hurts you if you have bad managers who want to micromanage, but the problem there isn't agile, it's your shit managers. You've just consistently had shit managers. Maybe your manager is still shit. Who knows.
eufemiapiccio77@reddit
Don’t forget “hey guys got to drop off for another call ping me if you need anything” literally no one ever needs them for anything.
GoGades@reddit
I really kind of want to shadow one of those clowns one day - they're in meetings all day - wtf they talking about in there.
NoUniverseExists@reddit
They should learn to code.
the_rolling_paper@reddit
Our Development Director asked our Manager to learn to code, he tried and then left the company.
NoUniverseExists@reddit
LMAO
another_dudeman@reddit
My dedicated scrum master fills up my calendar with meetings
ChemicalRascal@reddit
Give yourself meetings for your actual tasks. Not so many that you have no availability, and don't make up what they're about -- be honest that you're blocking out time within which you're gonna work on this or that or whatever.
Daemontatox@reddit
Same.....
mrplentycodes@reddit
Annoy developers.
morosis1982@reddit
A good scrum master can be an advantage, but there's too much pedagogical bullshit that a lot of the courses teach and too many don't have the leadership mind that you really need.
In reality, besides keeping the team on task with adhering to their sprint tasks and goals, they should be helping to remove blockers, being a facilitator working with stakeholders and the team.
In reality, you don't really need someone full time for this in a single team. We had agile guys that were available if the team felt they needed help with this stuff, but generally they'd get involved for a sprint or two to get the team on board, then the team would take over with whatever new process we'd come up with (not added, processes were always to change, never just adding later on layer).
kondorb@reddit
They should cease to exist as soon as possible.
A “scrum master” is just an extra task one of the devs should be doing for a couple beers, not a full time employee.
ClideLennon@reddit
This. We use to rotate who was the scrum master because it was just extra work and no one particularly wanted it.
Justin_Passing_7465@reddit
Paying a dev to do that work is pretty dumb. You can get a decent Scrum Master for less than half the cost of a decent dev. In an ideal world the Scrum Master takes everything off of the devs plate that doesn't absolutely require a dev to do. Are there any bullshit tasks that a Scrum Master could do for you?
DirtzMaGertz@reddit
Scrum master is an ideal world position. We don't live in an ideal world though and I've never seen one where a scrum master was genuinely necessary.
Justin_Passing_7465@reddit
"Necessary", no. Janitors are also not necessary - you can pay a developer who costs $200k/year to empty all of the garbage cans from from all of the cubicles every day.
kondorb@reddit
A janitor is enough work for a full time employee.
You don't hire a full time worker just to refill the coffee machine three times a week, which is the equivalent amount of work a "scrum master" role entails.
Justin_Passing_7465@reddit
If your Scrum Master is underutilized, then they can be the Scrum Master for more than one Scrum team. I have usually seen one person be the Scrum Master for 3-ish teams.
DirtzMaGertz@reddit
I think a janitors value is a lot more obvious and necessary to a company's operation than a scrum master is.
If you want to be literal to a pedantic degree then pretty much no one is necessary, but I think it's pretty obvious what the context of that word is here if you're not intentionally being dense.
AsleepDeparture5710@reddit
My company got rid of scrum masters and folded them into PM roles, but I will say running scrums was only part of what they actually did. In my experience they did all the org/secretarial roles for the team as well. Scheduling meetings, chasing down contacts on other teams, etc. That part was nice to have.
roodammy44@reddit
It's insane, I've been at a company who wouldn't hire testers but did hire scrum masters. The difference in cost and usefulness is staggering.
ChemicalRascal@reddit
Well, they probably didn't have a consultant selling manual testing to them. "Agile" consultants are everywhere.
likeittight_@reddit
Scrum master as a FTJ is 2010s party-never-ends shit
Void-kun@reddit
Tf is a dedicated scrum master? I always thought that was the team leaders role.
Definitely not enough work for a dedicated role
awjre@reddit
I always understood the Scrum Master as being the bridge between Business/Product/Leadership and Engineering.
p_bzn@reddit
Should not exist.
polypolip@reddit
Depends. If your team operates within an org with multiple other teams and possibly more than one PO their job can easily require full time. It might also mean the process in the company is more bloated and complicated than it should be
pydry@reddit
IME agile coaches are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It's usually not hard to get a team to become agile on its own. It's a natural way of working. Nonetheless, an agile coach can often help if they struggle.
However, if mamagement is determined to be waterfall - and they usually are - an agile coach cant coach them out of it coz theyre the boss.
And, a team cant be agile if management still wants waterfall processes layered on top.
Thus he generally turns into some kind of ceremony leader slash ticket monkey.
CodelinesNL@reddit
In my opinion full time scrum masters as a job title is a red flag. It is a strong indication that this is the type of top-down agile that isn't agile, with management that does not understand agile, and scrum masters as "process people" who don't understand agile or software engineering who keep making more process.
In a mature agile team, the scrum master role can easily be done by a (junior) developer. It should take almost no time at all.
Saucynachos@reddit
Where I worked that had one, they organized and ran the scrum meetings then they were the dedicated un-blocker. Something blocking you from doing your work? Kick it to the scrum master. Need an answer from someone that's not getting back with you? Scrum master goes and bugs the shit out of them to get the answer.
sebf@reddit
Useful answer.
formerlyInspector@reddit
hopefully coding maybe less than the previous sprint
AccurateInflation167@reddit
Literally shitpost on Reddit all day
chicknfly@reddit
I’m going through the comments and can note two things:
Nobody has a Scrum Master who works a purely Scrum role. And by extension, many of you are talking about Scrum and XP but calling it agile. And that’s because…
The duties of a Scrum Master, as detailed in the Scrum Guide, are so minimal. If we gave the responsibility of removing obstacles to the product owner and engineering manager, then all that’s left is time-boxing meetings. That part can be distributed to team leads and enabling a team culture that encourages active participation and respecting when someone calls out Elmo (or whatever key word that makes it clear we went off topic/sidetracked).
Anyway, Scrum is cool when it’s done right, but it’s never done right. And I have my Scrum Master certification (PSM1) and believe having a dedicated Scrum Master for most situations is pretty dumb.
SmellyButtHammer@reddit
The last company I was at that had dedicated scrum masters (15 years ago), their jobs were to schedule a bunch of pointless meetings every couple of weeks and waste everyone’s time.
If they’re just asking about the board consider yourself lucky.
Opposite-Hat-4747@reddit
Get a real job
ltdanimal@reddit
Devs in many causes have blind spots and rarely think about how the system operates, they just are in it.
A good scrum master should have a role of great facilitator (something most people suck at) and guide/mentor/coach.
Whether people like scrum or not, there is a reason certain things go together the way they do. A scrum master should know this very well, and be able to tweak things based on the needs of the team.
... In reality the scrum masters I've worked with kinda suck. They haven't built anything and so many times don't understand how and why certain things work and can be dogmatic. It's like a gatekeeper to the process and they are very much incentivized to keep things a certain way.
Fickle-Tomatillo-657@reddit
I remember having a scrum master. Just felt like a dev-nanny.
Deranged40@reddit
Among other things, they should round up everyone into a meeting every two weeks to talk about ideas to change the team's workflow.
When a new idea comes up and gains traction, it is then their job to remind the team that the new idea doesn't follow the best practices laid out by the scrum book they read when they were getting their certificate, and then shoot the idea down.
Mundane-Charge-1900@reddit
Quit? This is a bad sign that wherever you work is dysfunctional.
MrMichaelJames@reddit
Nothing they are a waste of a salary. They shouldn’t exist.
Montrell1223@reddit
Scrum master ? Haven’t heard that title in ages
SumTingWong59@reddit
Idk man I just want them to drive stand-ups and retros and stay out of the way
wasteoftime8@reddit
They should get a real job. Sorry, I've dealt with full time scrum masters in the past and have no answer for you. They do seemingly little to justify the fact that they're FTE
Physical-Compote4594@reddit
They should find a real job.
mpanase@reddit
A dedicated scrum master?
Play chess, prepare coffee for everybody, .... he will have plenty time for cook for the devs.
Prime624@reddit
After years of working at a company with a scrum master, most of which I believed it was a mostly unnecessary position, I'm now at a company without one and desperately miss it. Devs need organization badly, and keeping them organized is like herding cats. It's not something that can be done on top of existing work. At the very least, a team manager should be doing it and spending 30% of their time on it.
431p@reddit
always wondered what they do after scrum finishes. I worked with one that never replied to messages after scrum until the next morning before scrum.
CompassionateSkeptic@reddit
A dedicated scrum master should have most of their role be goal-driven, up so some hard boundaries. The goal is help surface real (as in evidence and reason based) sources of friction, impediment, and bottleneck.
On a team that doesn’t have any project management, guess what, there’s gonna involve a lot of project management.
But on a team that does have active project management, maybe they’re going to see that cycle time is high even though everyone is working on the right priorities and everyone is working effectively. Suddenly, the scrum masters role has changed to helping to be a bridge between embedded product development and embedded technical leadership to try to have fewer tasks that violate INVEST criteria and more people sharing the load of discovery work going into refinement instead of getting pointed to implementation.
And there’s a million of these scenarios to talk through.
That’s the job. People say that’s not the job and I think they’re wrong. That’s the job.
faldo@reddit
They should kill themselves
com2ghz@reddit
Usually the person that has the meetings on their behalf. Otherwise one person in the tesm had to do that snd with absence meetings couldn’t be modified. So we hire full time scrum masters that only serve that purpose. Oh yeah, sometimes they can share the screen.
Zenin@reddit
In theory:
Scrum is simple, but most people (especially smart people) get it very wrong and it ends up a mess as a result. #1 Enforce Scrum is there to keep the team on the rails.
Part of enforcing scrum happens is to ensure the ceremonies both occur and don't devolve into something else, again causing a mess. If your Daily is taking an hour, you've gone off the rails. If the sprint scope is expanding outside of planning, you've gone off the rails.
Unblocking the team: This is the meat of what a Scrum Master should be doing when you don't see them in a meeting: Dailies should be identifying blockers, not solving them (trying to solve them is how they turn into hour+ long dailies). The Scrum master should be the one taking those blockers as their own tasks to solve. Resolving blockers is the only out-of-sprint work that should ever happen and it shouldn't be the team doing that work, it's the role of the Scrum Master. Someone needs to figure out who owns the XYZ system, what the process is to get a damn API key out of them, get procurement to buy the licenses, get compliance to sign off on the arch, etc.
In practice even with all these guardrails the temptation of teams and business to drive the train off the rails is simply too great and the whole thing falls apart. That doesn't mean there's a better answer than Scrum, there rarely is, rather it's just a truism that most orgs would prefer to wallow in their own excrement than actually accomplish anything effectively. And when Scrum flys off the tracks and the org doesn't care there's no point in keeping a Scrum Master around to fix something no one cares to fix.
SquiffSquiff@reddit
You have repeated this several times. Scrum considers itself an 'agile' process however and the first point on The Agile Manifesto is:
Zenin@reddit
Agile and Scrum are related, but different. The OP specifically asked about Scrum Masters, so you should be consulting Scrum documentation, specifically:
https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#scrum-master
The Scrum Master is accountable for the Scrum Team’s effectiveness. They do this by enabling the Scrum Team to improve its practices, within the Scrum framework.
The rest of the document is more detailed specifics of how the Scrum Master accomplishes their mandate, most all of it reinforcing the Scrum Master's unique responsibility over the Scrum process itself.
rlbond86@reddit
Be fired and rethink their lives
Beneficial_Target_31@reddit
A good scrum master is a pms part time job.
PhishPhox@reddit
Every time these threads come up I see so much scrum master hate. But I love my scrum master - he acts as the perfect buffer from us devs and the PO/management. Sorry everyone else has bad experiences with theirs!
JunketSuch4062@reddit
In my experience as a PM, I feel like a real world scrum master should focus entirely on removing friction. If you are just scheduling meetings and staring at Jira, you are not adding value 😄
My team and I try to keep our process lean by using tools like linear for async updates. This avoids wasting time in daily syncs and protects the deep work state engineers need to solve problems. We also like to use use a tool called Easyretro to identify specific workflow friction so instead of just following a handbook, a good Scrum Master uses those insights to actually change how the team works.
Anyway, I think the goal shoulde be to make the process invisible so the team can focus on building great software! : )
tallicafu1@reddit
It has to be the last stop in IT. I’ve never worked with one that did anything meaningful or remotely important. Just a bunch of tryhards trying to convince people they’re important.
GoodishCoder@reddit
In my experience, they interface with the leaders who shouldn't really be bothering people but like to feel included, remove road blocks, schedule and facilitate meetings, and make sure the work is funneling through the right process when VP Bill keeps going to you directly with tasks.
labab99@reddit
I’m a half-time, technical scrum master, but in practice my responsibilities are closer to that of a team lead. Mentoring, keeping the team moving, defining specs & roadmap plans, and making sure we’re meeting our commitments.
Frankly I have no clue how a non-technical scrum master could produce value. Maybe if they’re super aggressive about extracting specs and dependency agreements from other teams?
eufemiapiccio77@reddit
Who’s still hiring for these roles. They have like till the end of the year before they don’t exist right they are a relic of “old world IT”
travelinzac@reddit
Probably seek employment because it's not a dedicated role to be a "scrum master"
Puncher1981@reddit
We have someone like that, although he has access to our chats and similar.
Positive: they act as moderator when we have discussions, intervening when we go too off-topic or are taking too long
Negative: they sometimes ask general "scrum master" questions such as "how will solving this story advance our theory of how to implement something so the users will want to use the software more" (can't remember the exact words. We are creating a new inhouse software superceding an old mainframe program, which the people of the company have to use for their daily work. We are not doing A/B-tests). Another "veto" was regarding our practice of "splitting" stories when they weren't completed by the end of a sprint (ex. an 8-point story where a lot of work was done, but which wasn't quite finished. Previously, the developer gave a rough estimate of how much work remained, so we then had a followup story, say 2 SP, for the remaining work. Now we move the entire story with all SP to the new sprint)
Looz-Ashae@reddit
Establish processes, if they are hasn't been; find bottlenecks via retrospections of projects on concrete examples where everything went south, find solutions to work around them or eradicate them; establish team's output, improve/cut processes so that output would stay the same; bother products so they provide roadmaps that follow goals and planned projects would have all sorts of criteria satisfied and described according to ICE, so that team gets already groomed and indeed valuable idea to implement, not some bogus to waste their time on. Ofc all of that should be put, described and automated via Jira. Lots of work tbh. If your scrum master doesn't do those, you're either already good, or they're not good at all.
the_rolling_paper@reddit
We have Agile coach in our team. I don't understand what these guys do
nosayso@reddit
I've had 1 person in my career do this job well, 1 person do it okay, and then many people do it in a way that was completely pointless.
Good behaviors:
* Facilitate the meetings - daily scrum, sprint planning, refinement, etc - this requires the person to be competent enough to follow along (they should be slightly technically minded) but the value add can be as you're refining intent you're having to explain it like I'm 5 so you're getting real-time fact checked that you understand what needs to be done by being forced to explain it without too much tech jargon
* Management buffer - management talks to them, they only bring important stuff to you, to hopefully free time to focus on engineering
Bad behaviors:
* Insisting on being a complete buffer - devs still need to talk to product to clarify requirements, putting a person in the middle is just pointless
Even best case this is not a full-time job (so they should be doing it for 2 teams or they will be under-employed) and also not really adding a lot of value. I worked at a large company that eliminated this role entirely a few years ago, I think pretty much everywhere has, for basically that exact reason - even done the best it could possibly be it just doesn't make sense to have a dedicated non-technical "scrum master".
It's also never been recommended by Agile best practices as far as I know, which recommends the Scrum Master be a rotating responsibility among engineers on the team. It's like a weird mutation from companies with more archaic project management frameworks.
PositiveUse@reddit
Nothing and that’s why companies are getting rid of them now.
Some_Developer_Guy@reddit
I'd be looking for a new career, their days are numbered
sleepyguy007@reddit
they should lose their job, and split that salary among the devs they previously worked with.
dbxp@reddit
In a proper agile system they probably shouldn't exist.
However where I've seen the role kind of work is where they've been acting as a delivery manager. Normally that would be the role of the product owner but they might get swamped with sales tender meetings or service delivery work
Dymatizeee@reddit
Suck money from the company while pretending to work
lolCLEMPSON@reddit
Any time you see someone who's job title is "Scrum Master" you know they are doing it wrong.
gokkai@reddit
Facilitate meetings
reddit_time_waster@reddit
pretend to work and make more money than developers/qa
shroomaro@reddit
The only dedicated scrum master I knew retired after he got laid off a few years back.
alanbdee@reddit
That's not right and they don't understand what the scrum master role is. It should be one of the devs, a peer to the rest of the team. Best if its someone who's been around a long time and knows everyone and knows who to talk to to unblock stuff. What you have is a project manager with a scrum master title.