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.'

Comments

Scrum is bad, don't use it

[mysidia]

The problem with scrum is it ignores the psychology of software development.

You want to put an intern in charge of the process; probably someone the least experienced of all the developers.

And the scrum master has a role that puts him/her in charge of the whole process, and as enforcer of the rules, essentially a management position.

Your average engineer won't look on this kindly. It's one thing if you put an experienced PM or engineer in charge of the process, putting an intern in charge is like an insult to the dev team.

Honestly, you're probably best rotating the job of ScrumMaster every few months between all developers, so it doesn't seem like the position is special.

Scrum is a great idea. In Theory.

[JustShootMe]

I hve been in two different implementations of scrum. In the first implementation, management only viewed it as a way to get more work out of the team, and refused to change course or admit their mistake. The product owner and scrummaster were the same person, they insisted on changing the scope of the iteration midway through, we never ever passed an iteration and were going farther and farther away from doing so as things went on, and morale dropped like a stone. Things became very acrimonious. I left that company a few months ago, this being one of the reasons, and as far as I know they are still doing their misbegotten bastardization of the process.

Scrum is a very good idea when it's done exactly like it is supposed to be, by management who are willing to entirely and completely commit to the process, and when it is done on teams whose product cycles are compatible with scrum, such as developers. It does not work with operations type people, such as sysadmins, whose time is mostly spent putting out fires, and it certainly does not work when incompetent management refuses to see it as anything else but a bunch of little waterfalls. Unfortunately, for me, it's nothing but a buzzword that makes me want to viscerally run far, far away whenever I hear it.