Do we need a Scrum Master forever?
tryscrum.com
tryscrum.com
I view the whole thing as a sort of cult/koolaid/consulting industry. The original intentions of the Agile Manifesto may be good, and I admit there are some good ideas in there, but the entire industry that has formed around it is a waste of money IMO.
That your organization is too siloed and ignorant of the what colleagues do to write proper requirements. And that your engineers are too ignorant and siloed to speak up when requirements aren't appropriate.
And more formality, rote obedience to procedure, and documentation are going to solve this?
Tl;dr - If your organizational culture is fucked up and not working, fix your organizational culture. There's not enough agile in the world to build on top of a cracked foundation.
Scrum master: One time I was having an argument with a couple engineers because we couldn’t figure out how to implement a particular thing. I said “if K (a senior architect) was here, we’d be able to settle this, but I’m sure his schedule is booked up”. We continued arguing in circles, then suddenly 5 minutes later K materialized out of the ether. Our scrummaster had overheard me saying that, and silently navigated the bureaucracy to get us immediate time with the person we needed, all without being asked, and that unblocked our team. When you have a good scrummaster, they’ll know when it’s OK to bend/break rules and when to enforce them, and they’ll have a “particular set of skills” necessary to keeping the team unblocked.
Product Owner: At my previous job there was a Product Owner named Terry who I continue to hold up as the gold standard. She was totally unafraid to get her hands dirty learning about the part of the system she was stewarding. You could parachute her into a deeply technical area and within a sprint she’d have found the happy paths, the edge cases, the things customers cared about/didn’t, and she’d (this is critical) be in a position to reject stories that legitimately didn’t pass muster. She perfectly walked the difficult line of knowing when to call BS on someone and knowing when to trust their explanation.
When done poorly, scrum masters fall back on rigidly performing ceremonies or processes without considering whether they’re providing value. When done poorly, Product Owners will ask developers “what’s this thing I’m accepting?”, and hopefully the developer did their job, because the PO won’t know if they didn’t and will just rubber stamp the story. The unfortunate thing is that there are a lot of folks in these roles who are simply “performing the motions”, and so the overall reputation of these roles gets tarnished as a result. But when done well, they deliver a lot of value.
The problem is the vast majority of times you don't get those good people in these roles and it ends up hindering then helping on average.
This, 100%. The best PM I ever worked with had exactly the same skillset.
If your PO / PM can't internalize the technical edges of the product quickly, it's better to have no one in the role.
And that's a difficult ask, because it's extremely hard to reason logically about something you had 12 hours to cram for, with people who are experts at it. But nonetheless, I've known people who can do exactly that!
Unfortunately, there are far fewer of them than open PO / PM job roles...
This is made worse at a lot of companies by hiring the absolutely cheapest person for the role.
If someone is toxic to a team, they shouldn't remain at that company (much less on that team).
Our team is productive, manages their time well, and communicates without meetings. Did anyone actually need a meeting, ever?
In any case, when I am scrum master I put a lot of effort into keeping the backlog clean and making sure people or teams don’t block each other. I think that’s a valuable thing to do and can be close to a full time job. The big question is why we still have project managers and line managers who sort of do the same thing. Right now we have Jira to track things for the devs, but project managers use MS project so we have the same information in different tools which causes a lot of overhead to synchronize reporting.
- We choose to do X
- Do we need someone being responsible for X?
The answer is almost always "yes". If you want Scrum, then having someone who has explicitly been dedicated to it makes sense.
Why do you think it was a fad that died out 10 years ago?
Because the last time I heard anyone in my circle of friends (which includes people who work at Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Spotify, etc) mention scrum was more than a decade ago.
I've seen people using some Agile methodologies, but not the Scrum framework.
This being a perfect example. Jedberg never heard of Spotify using Scrum "for 10 years" but they'd been using it the whole time, as confirmed by jedberg.
Its easy to find official blog posts of these companies and other major enterprises describing how they use Scrum, that are much more recent than 10 years ago.
I'm shocked you've never heard of the "Spotify Model" which has been compared to Scrum@Scale. Ask your friend!
> [Squads] are a self-organizing team and decide their own way of working – some use Scrum sprints, some use Kanban, some use a mix of these approaches.
> The foundation of the model is the squad and it acts like a Scrum team.
The Spotify model resembles Scrum@Scale which is why I mentioned it. Scrum is a development methodology.
> Each of the squad has complete freedom to choose their agile methodology. So some squad uses Scrum sprints, some use Kanban and some uses mix of scrum and kanban. Sometimes to release early, squads apply the Most viable product (MVP) technique too.
The Spotify model is not related to Scrum. It organizes people. How those people manage their work is not related to how the people are organized. An article explaining the Spotify model in terms of Scrum isn’t a counterexample to that.
Is there only one "The Official" ScrumBan, or can anyone make their own?
Also, I just talked to my friend who is an Eng manager at Apple, and they said almost no one uses Scrum at Apple anymore. Some teams use some of the methodology, but even those teams got rid of their Scrum masters.
Wait, that contradicts what you just said. Your friend that works there hasn't mentioned Scrum in 10 years!
Thanks for confirming that there are teams at Apple using Scrum, like I said. Dev teams at Apple are pretty insular, I'm surprised your friend knows about what every team is doing! Hopefully we can trust them more than your friend who was wrong about Spotify.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GK1NDTWbkY
Spotify Engineering Culture (by Henrik Kniberg)- Part 2 (2014)
What’s for an enterprise exec not to love?
Some large companies, actually invest their time in agile training and contribute to SE process research. From large companies, I can call Ericsson and Spotify (good scrum at scale examples).
master for main branch?