I didn't really finish that thought:

It is not necessary for scrummasters to be technical to be useful to a
team if that team has obstacles that the scrummaster can remove. It is
necessary for teams that have newly adopted Agile to have technical
advisers, because there are technical implications to working in
smaller, faster increments.

A technical coach is an important part of any successful Agile
adoption, but other experts of various kinds are also useful, and a
savvy scrummaster can be useful in identifying opportunities to direct
those efforts to maximum effect. A scrummaster need not know too much
about any particular aspect to do that, although being an effective
leader (notice that I didn't say "manager") is vital.

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 2:47 PM, Adam Sroka <adam.sroka@...> wrote:
> 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-managers 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
>>
>>
>


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