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

why use scrum in the first place

[Anonymous Coward]

Do without all the agile scrum diddle doo, and you'll be just fine.

you seem to be wasting your time with implementing a particular coding methodology,
instead of doing actual useful coding.

Re:why use scrum in the first place

[Matthew Weigel]

No, it's not. "I know you tried to do scrum, but you had a failed project, so you did it wrong."

In my experience, scrum is just snake oil. I don't think it's very good to begin with, but worse is that a) everyone modifies scrum to some extent to fit their organization and b) if a project using slightly modified scrum fails, it was because they modified scrum.

Of course, the solution always seems to be hire more good scrum masters, who are "rarer then you would think!" That's really the part that is snake oil, in my mind. It's a business model for consultants, and the trainers of those consultants. This is even more clear with the scrum model's insistence that a scrum master has a "pig" role.

Maybe all the scrum organizations should promote the idea that every time a scrum project fails (yes, even with modifications, which is how it always works), the scrum master gets fired. Here, "fails" should probably mean over budget or over schedule, by a dollar or a day. That might give the scrum master a role where they feel like their bacon is on the line. But of course that won't happen; scrum masters aren't team leads (as you point out), they're not managers, they're just coaches... one more person not doing the actual work who has to be involved, but with less accountability and more power than anyone else in the project.

WTF does this mean???

[PontifexPrimus]

Could we please get some explanatory links in here? This reads like a mix between a corporate nightmare ("harmful to our velocity"? SERIOUSLY?) and the rantings of an MMORPG nerd ("I was a level 72 ScrumMaster specced for Agility, but then they nerfed that and our Team Leads couldn't afford the new +5 leadership crafts, so we completely tanked at the Waterfalls of Development, even though we hired N00Bs as cannon fodder!").
Jargon, people! And don't chastise me for not RTFA - there is no FA to read!

Re:WTF does this mean???

[Mathiasdm]

Here you go :-)

And yes, you are absolutely right. I couldn't entirely understand the article either.

Re:WTF does this mean???

[stephanruby]

Could we please get some explanatory links in here?

While this is not my area of expertise, I think I can explain. His team leaders/scrotum masters are poor leaders. They don't seem to understand flexibility. He on the other hand, he thinks he understands flexibility. And he wants an intern to be the scrotum master.

The only part that I find confusing is that interns are usually the slaves, not the masters. Somehow, this guy thinks that a new slave can suddenly become a master just like that. That, I don't think so. So I'm either misunderstanding something, or this guy is missing the bigger picture. The issue that the team lead is overburdened is probably a very real problem, that I don't doubt. But it seems to me, this anonymous poster would just be trading one problem for another. An intern doesn't have the experience. An intern doesn't have the authority. One might as very well leave the scrotum alone if there is no one there that can handle it.

"Our mis-implementation of Agile includes.."

[IainMH]

"Our mis-implementation of Agile includes.." ..is a pretty good idea for a ThinkGeek t-shirt.

!rugby

[IRoll11!s]

funniest tag on a post ever

Clearly a targetted post:

[BluePojo]

If you work on an agile dev team, this post uses every day language. (yeah, velocity is not an unusual word when referring to backlog burndown rate :D) If you're just an enthusiast or work in IT, this post is crazy off the wall nuts.

At any rate, to respond to the post:

The best method of handling who is the scrum master I have encountered is by not giving the job to one single person. A rotation every 4 sprints seems to work well (we do 2 week sprints), as it spreads the load of scrum master around and it keeps us from getting into a rut when doing sprint planning and retrospectives, as a different person is running it every 2 months. You're right that giving your strongest developer the task of scrum master is asking to have your strongest developer not code as much, but if you have your intern running scrum, you may find that lack of understanding of prioritization will impact your velocity quite a lot more than giving extra work to your lead.

One additional thing to note is how efficient you are in scrum master tasks... if you're hand writing stickies to put on the scrum board, you're probably wasting time. Any half decent script monkey should be able to write a script to parse your backlog and generate stickies for you. :)

Agile

[Frankie70]

In my opinion, Agile is a great tool for managers, not developers.
Every manager in the end wants to ask for status reports every day.
But they can't do so, because people working for them will be upset.
Agile is an excellent way for Managers to ask for status reports
everyday.

In my opinion, TDD (test driven developement) is the only good thing
about Agile.

Here is Scott Adams about Agile.
http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/11/28/dilbert-on-extreme-and-agile-programming/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/63914774/

Re:Wrong all wrong

[Haeleth]

You probably meant that to be sarcasm, but it's actually the correct response. Let's give up on looking for silver bullets. Let's abandon the stupid idea that slavishly following the latest fashionable religion^Wmethodology is going to produce perfect code.

Instead, let's recognise the truth: development is hard, and the best programmers are orders of magnitude better than the worst. Let's employ the best, pay them decent wages, give them decent work environments, and let them get on with the goddamn job instead of forcing them to play silly mind games.

Re:Yikes

[religious freak]

I think Warren Buffet said it best when he said "if you can't explain it in simple terms, you don't understand it". He said "young kids" (he's 80+, so who knows what he considers a young kid) come in pitching ideas using the fanciest of terms but when he asks for clarification, he can't get it, because they don't understand the fundamentals. And though it was a major pain in the ass, working at a helpdesk for a year taught me a lot because you NEED to distill things down to their core components and strip away all the crap. Stripping away crap == understanding fundamentals == true understanding. When you have a fundamental understanding, then you can add the bells and whistles

Honestly, it sounds to me like OP hiding behind lingo without actually understanding what's really going on. Yeah, he's saying something (and I understand it, I guess) but he's got so much crap, perhaps he can't see the forest from the trees.

PS. Scrum == worst. methodology. name. ever

Re:Wrong all wrong

[Jurily]

instead of forcing them to play silly mind games.

That's why I like Joel's approach.

When you cut through all the gibberish

[petes_PoV]

You've got a development team. The senior members have been promoted to team leaders.

No matter how you want to spin this, or wrap it up with neologisms, it's the same old stuff, with the same old problems and (it seems) the same old organisation - just with different names. In the end you (or your team / scrum call it what you will) still has ti turn out a product. Those who help get the praise, those who hinder get the promotions :-(

Just like every development methodology before it - and no doubt, the ones to come - if you have talented people, they'll get the work done. If you have indolent people, no techniques: agile or not, will help you. Stop worrying about scrums, roles and all that malarkey - get on with the job of developing your product.

Everyone in a company has problems to overcome. How you deal with them is the olny measure of your worth.

Oh, for fckn, sake...

[KZigurs]

Forget all about agile, forget all about scrum and forget all about management. The only places where I have seen some good code actually being written are the places where there were no 'process', there were no 'evangelists' and it was absolutely normal for managers and devs to swap roles in who is managing who - naturally.
No process will improve on a (welcomed) shout across the room and reply coming back in 5 seconds.

Scrum master = Project manager!!!!!

[node159]

Scrum master = Project manager!!!!!

Scrum master is a fancy word for project manager! If people start realizing this you wouldnâ(TM)t have the shit that the poster mentioned going on. Who in their right mind would make their technical lead or an intern a project manager...