My job has a “scrum master”. She’s nice, I guess, but as far as I can tell her entire job is sharing her screen so we can look at tickets. Then people tell her what to click on and what text to change. It’s excruciating because it would just be faster for the person talking to change it, instead of being like “remove the second bullet point. No, not that one”
On top of that they have all these tasks for “unit testing” but they don’t actually do unit testing. Someone just said, in the distant past, we should do testing so it’s there.
This is just like PMs where I work. They are generic PMs with no background in the work we do, so they end up being spreadsheet updaters and meeting schedulers (which literally everyone can easily do themselves).
I loved being the scrum master but the responsibilities should be more than presenter.
I had to deliver project status notes to product shareholders, let them know of any directional changes we had to take due to blockages, drive the team to deliver on time for product launch, manage the backlog workflow to ensure the dod was accomplished, manage the backlog and attribute 15% of it to housecleaning/bug fixes.
This. A scrum master’s job should be first and foremost making sure that the dev team has what it needs to get real actual work done. Ideally, the scrum master should be face tanking face tanking status/ update meeting, coordinating
with outside entities, and ensuring that as few distractions make it to the team as possible.
Exactly. A good scrum master shields the team from the bureaucracy, facilitates the meetings while keeping them targeted and on-topic, and keeps everything running instead of slowing it down. They also coach the team in self-organisation.
There are far too many people that call themselves scrum masters that are actually just pressurising ticket managers.
My job has a “scrum master”. She’s nice, I guess, but as far as I can tell her entire job is sharing her screen so we can look at tickets. Then people tell her what to click on and what text to change. It’s excruciating because it would just be faster for the person talking to change it, instead of being like “remove the second bullet point. No, not that one”
On top of that they have all these tasks for “unit testing” but they don’t actually do unit testing. Someone just said, in the distant past, we should do testing so it’s there.
This is just like PMs where I work. They are generic PMs with no background in the work we do, so they end up being spreadsheet updaters and meeting schedulers (which literally everyone can easily do themselves).
I loved being the scrum master but the responsibilities should be more than presenter.
I had to deliver project status notes to product shareholders, let them know of any directional changes we had to take due to blockages, drive the team to deliver on time for product launch, manage the backlog workflow to ensure the dod was accomplished, manage the backlog and attribute 15% of it to housecleaning/bug fixes.
This. A scrum master’s job should be first and foremost making sure that the dev team has what it needs to get real actual work done. Ideally, the scrum master should be face tanking face tanking status/ update meeting, coordinating with outside entities, and ensuring that as few distractions make it to the team as possible.
Exactly. A good scrum master shields the team from the bureaucracy, facilitates the meetings while keeping them targeted and on-topic, and keeps everything running instead of slowing it down. They also coach the team in self-organisation.
There are far too many people that call themselves scrum masters that are actually just pressurising ticket managers.