4 ms·
As someone who pulled part-time scrum master duties in a seed stage startup, the problem is that engineers, even good ones, tend to be not-so-great communicator
by mcmcmc 3y ago
As someone who pulled part-time scrum master duties in a seed stage startup, the problem is that engineers, even good ones, tend to be not-so-great communicators. Having someone to grease the wheels in stand ups and planning meetings decreases the time it takes for issues to surface. The other half of the job is cleaning the backlog and keeping the product owner from derailing development. It’s more about waste reduction than adding value.
Granted this was just my very limited experience, and we didn’t spend much time on estimating and standups consisted of a scheduled daily Slack ping instead of a meeting since we had major timezone offsets. People over process and all that.
- regularfry 3y agoNot only that. Agile processes in general are supposed to protect everyone from sinking a tonne of effort into successfully building the wrong thing. It doesn't matter if people aren't going as fast as they otherwise might, if the counterfactual has them going in completely the wrong direction. Scrum itself is more specifically designed to protect the team from management interference. Engineers might think it's a waste of time preventing them from getting things done, but in its absence (where it's truly needed) what would actually be happening is constant micromanagement, context switching, and death-march deadline pressure. In its originally-intended form it's not an arbitrary collection of hand-holding niceties, it's a self-defence measure.