Wow.

I have not been officially certified as a Scrum Master, you know. I’m really learning on the job and will go to certification later in the year - so right now everything is a bit bewildering. What is a Scrum Master’s actual job? I took some time to look into this and found a blog post called A Scrum Master’s Checklist. It seems to me that the metric for the Scrum Master is how well the team is running. Ken Schwaber affectionately calls the person with the Scrum Master role “the one ringable neck”. Yikes! This checklist seems to do with how others are doing on the team, and keeping important information in everyone’s face. Here’s a couple items:

• Do team members hold each other accountable to high standards, and challenge each other to grow?
• Are team members spending some of their time in the state of flow?
• Could any requirements (especially those near the top of the Product Backlog) be better expressed as independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, and testable user stories?
• Have you educated your Product Owner about technical debt and how to avoid it? One piece of the puzzle may be adding automated test and refactoring to the definition of “done” for each backlog item.

It seems that a Scrum Master is there to ensure that the Agile practice is actually delivering the promises of on-time, on-budget software through the efforts of a self-organizing team. Many of the items on this list are dismissed as impossible. Really, they are - I know people who have been developing for 10+ years and they just don’t believe that what Agile says is possible, truly is!

Well, honestly, if this sort of work is impossible, I don’t know why anyone would want to be in the industry at all! If you take the counter-point to all of these items, you are describing a very painful world. So I really hope it is possible. I guess that hope is pretty important to being a real Scrum Master, whatever that is.

Tags: agile, Scrum, Scrum Master