Slashdot Mirror
Highly-Paid Developers As ScrumMasters?
An anonymous reader writes 'At my company, our mis-implementation of Agile includes the employment of some of our most highly-paid, principal engineers as ScrumMasters. This has effectively resulted in a loss of those engineering functions as these engineers now dedicate their time to ScrumMastery. Furthermore, the ScrumMasters either cannot or do not separate their roles as Team Leads with those of ScrumMastery and — worse — seem to be completely unaware that this poor implementation of Agile development is harmful to our velocity. To date, I have chalked this up to poor leadership, a general lack of understanding of Agile, and an inability to change from traditional roles left over from the waterfall development mode. In addition, I have contended that, for a given Scrum Team, the role of ScrumMaster should be filled by someone of lower impact, such as an intern brought in specifically for that purpose. But I would like to put the questions to Slashdotters as to whether they have seen these same transitional difficulties, what the results have been at their respective companies, or whether they just plain disagree with my assertion that principal engineers should not be relegated to the roles of ScrumMasters.'
Pretty funny. /. should have a humor section. Is this ScumMaster something like the Keymaster?
Jeez, I could respond to all kinds of /. posts in this way.
This is news for nerds. You might reasonably be expected to know what Scrum is - or at least how to find out.
It means that the real problem is nothing to do with Agile ScrumMasters(TM) leading their teams over developing waterfalls and all to do with that fact that their management's leadership abilities are clearly only exceeded by their communication skills.
I love how this is modded informative.