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What’s the overall feeling towards scrum masters? In my last company, everyone outside product tech never understood their actual value. My CTO was a big fan, h

by baxtr 4y ago

What’s the overall feeling towards scrum masters? In my last company, everyone outside product tech never understood their actual value. My CTO was a big fan, he said they were the glue binding the teams together or something like that. I never had a strong opinion but I’m curious to see how much controversy there was around this role.

tass 4y ago
At an old team of mine at Amazon we would assign an SDE to that role and switch it around every few months or so. They were in charge of getting the right people together for any meetings, asking for extra info to be added to any backlog items, and telling teams when we were planning to deprioritise or drop the backlog items they asked for. It worked pretty well for us, and took maybe a day of time per week
- morelisp 4y ago
  > we would assign an SDE to that role and switch it around every few months or so... took maybe a day of time per week The problem is if you are having a struggling team, it takes a lot more of a day of time and requires a lot more maturity than just leaving jira comments and sending meeting invites. But if you put your devs who are good at structuring problems/time on it, now they're participating in the actual development less, so the team gets even less functional (at best temporarily, at worst you're now in a death spiral). Furthermore if the root problem is not really the organizing but more fundamental (poor skills / skill alignment, understaffing, chaos agent, etc) the singular dev will rarely have the ability to deal with it and can even start drawing animosity. Having a separate person responsible for this, in a different hierarchy with different ears, can be a lot more effective in these situations. (It can also make it worse, if the separate person is also shit at their job, has too much work, has very different attitudes towards work than the rest of the team, ...) tl;dr: If your team is functional pretty much anything will work, these structures also need to be judged by how well they can get it back on track from non-functional.
ecshafer 4y ago
I don't see the point of scrum masters personally. They create more work if anything and mostly act as a cargo cult leader. A manager, a tech lead / staff developer, product manager... the other tech leadership positions on a team i see immediate value. Scrum Masters I do not and never have seen their use.
i_like_apis 4y ago
It really depends on who they are and how good at their job they are. I’ve seen more bad ones than good ones. I prefer a lead or senior developer to have the role rather than a dedicated non- or even former- developer. When a good lead dev with good communication skills and experience has the role it can be awesome.
- morelisp 4y ago
  It is rarely awesome for the lead or senior dev.
  - i_like_apis 4y ago
    Anyone who doesn’t want to do it is the wrong person, and doesn’t sound like a good lead dev to me.
    - morelisp 4y ago
      A lead dev isn't necessarily a team lead. They could be a technical lead, or an architect, or simply a senior dev with deep knowledge of one specific project. They may not have the interest, skill, or authority to deal with the situation. Even if they can do it you may be pushing them towards quitting or burnout; or creating a feedback loop where their technical contributions drop because they need to coordinate more people because quality is dropping because your top dev's technical contributions dropped.
      - i_like_apis 4y ago
        Sounds weak. I wouldn’t call that person a team lead or a lead dev. Agile doesn’t take much effort if you know what you’re doing. It’s just a card wall, standups and a planning meeting. This is not hard for a good lead dev. If you think it’s hard, you probably aren’t a good lead dev, or you don’t know how to do it right, which is the same thing.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
I thought Anton Oliver performed exceptionally well for the All Blacks in the 90s, and even his return in the early 2000s added a lot of much needed experience to the front row.
tkiolp4 4y ago
They are so 2010s. Hopefully the role will die soon in the 2020s.

by baxtr 4y ago

tass 4y ago

At an old team of mine at Amazon we would assign an SDE to that role and switch it around every few months or so. They were in charge of getting the right people together for any meetings, asking for extra info to be added to any backlog items, and telling teams when we were planning to deprioritise or drop the backlog items they asked for. It worked pretty well for us, and took maybe a day of time per week

morelisp 4y ago
> we would assign an SDE to that role and switch it around every few months or so... took maybe a day of time per week The problem is if you are having a struggling team, it takes a lot more of a day of time and requires a lot more maturity than just leaving jira comments and sending meeting invites. But if you put your devs who are good at structuring problems/time on it, now they're participating in the actual development less, so the team gets even less functional (at best temporarily, at worst you're now in a death spiral). Furthermore if the root problem is not really the organizing but more fundamental (poor skills / skill alignment, understaffing, chaos agent, etc) the singular dev will rarely have the ability to deal with it and can even start drawing animosity. Having a separate person responsible for this, in a different hierarchy with different ears, can be a lot more effective in these situations. (It can also make it worse, if the separate person is also shit at their job, has too much work, has very different attitudes towards work than the rest of the team, ...) tl;dr: If your team is functional pretty much anything will work, these structures also need to be judged by how well they can get it back on track from non-functional.

ecshafer 4y ago

I don't see the point of scrum masters personally. They create more work if anything and mostly act as a cargo cult leader. A manager, a tech lead / staff developer, product manager... the other tech leadership positions on a team i see immediate value. Scrum Masters I do not and never have seen their use.

i_like_apis 4y ago

It really depends on who they are and how good at their job they are. I’ve seen more bad ones than good ones. I prefer a lead or senior developer to have the role rather than a dedicated non- or even former- developer. When a good lead dev with good communication skills and experience has the role it can be awesome.

morelisp 4y ago
It is rarely awesome for the lead or senior dev.
- i_like_apis 4y ago
  Anyone who doesn’t want to do it is the wrong person, and doesn’t sound like a good lead dev to me.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    A lead dev isn't necessarily a team lead. They could be a technical lead, or an architect, or simply a senior dev with deep knowledge of one specific project. They may not have the interest, skill, or authority to deal with the situation. Even if they can do it you may be pushing them towards quitting or burnout; or creating a feedback loop where their technical contributions drop because they need to coordinate more people because quality is dropping because your top dev's technical contributions dropped.
    - i_like_apis 4y ago
      Sounds weak. I wouldn’t call that person a team lead or a lead dev. Agile doesn’t take much effort if you know what you’re doing. It’s just a card wall, standups and a planning meeting. This is not hard for a good lead dev. If you think it’s hard, you probably aren’t a good lead dev, or you don’t know how to do it right, which is the same thing.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

I thought Anton Oliver performed exceptionally well for the All Blacks in the 90s, and even his return in the early 2000s added a lot of much needed experience to the front row.

tkiolp4 4y ago

They are so 2010s. Hopefully the role will die soon in the 2020s.