I have always been suspicious of Scrummasters. If there are a lot of
organizational obstacles and they are effective in removing them then
they are worth their weight in gold. However, there is a tendency to
devolve in one of two directions:

1) The team is highly effective and therefore the scrummaster role is
superfluous.

2) The obstacles that the team encounters are not of a kind that the
scrummaster can effectively remove because of lack of skill,
direction, or resources.

In the first case I wish that Scrum teams more often had the courage
to realize that scrummaster need not be a permanent role for an
individual on a team. At some point I would expect a mature Agile team
to realize that everyone is a facilitator/obstacle-remover and
therefore it isn't special.

For the second problem I think it is necessary to coach scrummasters
to more effectively identify where they can provide help and when to
ask for it themselves. It also behooves an organization that wants to
reap the benefits of Agile teams to make available resources (Such as
coaching or other expertise) for the scrummaster to turn to.

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 2:37 PM, John Goodsen <jgoodsen@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 5:17 PM, woynam <woyna@...> wrote:
>>
>> Huh? The team is responsible for the technical practices, not the SM. The
SM's role is to ensure that the *process* is being followed, not that the
product is technically sound. If the process is being followed, it will be
rather apparent if the technical foundation is getting the job done.
>>
>> Whether it's a full time job really depends on the team, and the impediments.
If the team is well-versed in the process, then less time will be required
coaching. However, a large number of impediments may still take up a lot of
time.
>>
>
>>
>> There are plenty of coaches that haven't played professionally, and yet
manage to lead their teams to victory. I'm a golfer. How many tournaments have
Butch Harmon, and Hank Haney won? Too few to count.
>>
> I didn't say they had to have a wall of trophies, but they damned well better
know how to golf if I'm going to pay them to coach me.  A scrum master that
doesn't know how to write software is of limited usefulness in my book.   I'll
take a coach that knows how to code over a scrum master any day.  There aren't
many around for everybody to have, so we've seen this role called Scrumaster
become the crutch, and daree I say a ploy to sell certification training to
people who often have no business being involved on a software project - at
least the dozens of
archealogically-challenged-just-got-my-certification-cuz-I-got-layed-off-manager\
s that I've been running into the last couple years.
>
> ... and I realize I'm prolly trolling because this *is* a Scrum list ... and
you know how I like to rile up the troops  :-)
>
> --
> John Goodsen                 RADSoft / Better Software Faster
> jgoodsen@...            Lean/Agile/XP/Scrum Coaching and Training
> http://www.radsoft.com          Ruby on Rails and Java Solutions
>
>